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Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 16:28:05 +0100
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To: Sara Golemon <pollita@php.net>, Robert Landers <landers.robert@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Discussion: String streams
From: pierre-php@processus.org (Pierre)

Le 22/03/2022 à 16:14, Sara Golemon a écrit :
> On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 5:38 AM Robert Landers <landers.robert@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> But why can't we have generic operator overloading in which case this could
>> be completely built by libraries in userland?
>>
> I mean... honestly, I feel like I come back around to this very quickly.
> Generic overloading gives us much more at the end of the day and allows the
> people using PHP day in and day out to make the actual decisions about what
> any of these APIs should look like.
>
> So while I said I wanted to avoid the firestorm suggesting userspace
> overloading would bring, maybe that's the question to ask:
>
> Who's just a hard-nope on userspace operator overloading?  If your reasons
> go beyond foot-gun (and that is a valid reason), could you share what those
> reasons are?
>
> -Sara

Hello,

I am a not so hard-nope against userland operator overloading because 
it's magic. My day job is 20% writing code, 30% speaking with clients, 
and 50% reading and using community code. Userland operators are not as 
explicit as verbose method calls; and you can't ctrl-space an operator 
in any existing IDE, it's not obvious at what they does when you read 
code using them in most cases, and beyond that, in order to use them, 
you have to read an external documentation. Not that I don't read 
external documentation, but 80% of time, reading directly interfaces in 
my IDE is enough to know what to do with an API. When an API uses 
methods for doing stuff, code is auto-documented, when people start 
overriding operator, not so much (at least not as easy to find and 
understand at first sight) especially if the code is segregated behind 
interfaces and those interfaces don't explicit the operators (At least I 
hope that, if userland operators land, that interfaces will have a way 
to explicit the override).

And in the end, operators are just sugar for method calls. I don't 
dislike writing $c = $a->plus($b) instead of $c = $a + $b, I even found 
that there's some kind of elegance behind writing stuff explicitly. 
There's no feature in the world that would be blocked by the lack of 
operator overloading.

Moreover, the << >> c++ style stream operators are no more than a way to 
implement the string builder pattern, if I understand it well. Then why 
can't simply we use a StringBuilder class and use methods such as 
append(), prepend() and all ? It's much more explicit and much less 
alien-like for most people.

Regards,

--

Pierre