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Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2023 13:30:07 -0800
Message-ID: <CAMrTa2HxC7V=VZW7-hhYM96naGxruz=MpDUi23cfBwwvifWhow@mail.gmail.com>
To: Robert Landers <landers.robert@gmail.com>
Cc: "G. P. B." <george.banyard@gmail.com>, Alexander Pravdin <alex.pravdin@interi.co>, 
	internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Proposal: Arbitrary precision native scalar type
From: jordan.ledoux@gmail.com (Jordan LeDoux)

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On Tue, Dec 12, 2023 at 1:00=E2=80=AFPM Robert Landers <landers.robert@gmai=
l.com>
wrote:

>
> Hey Gina,
>
> > GMP supports operator overloading
>
> GMP kinda-sorta-most-of-the-time supports operator overloading.
> Sometimes ... it doesn't. I implemented a field library in PHP (for
> work a couple of years ago) and occasionally, overloading would cast
> things back to float/int and break the math. I don't have access to
> that code, so I don't have any examples readily available (and the
> fact that an extension can do overloading but we can't in user-land is
> a whole different can of worms which made this library ridiculously
> hard to work with -- we rewrote everything in Scala and never looked
> back). Needless to say, if I were to go into a project that required
> GMP, I wouldn't trust the overloading.
>
> Just my 2=C2=A2
>

I tried not to bring that up in this discussion because it would probably
sound bitter/unhelpful, but the lack of userland operator overloading is
definitely something that makes a native decimal scalar more necessary.
Voters have repeatedly rejected userland operator overloads. The last
proposal was mine, and most of the people who voted not told me that they
didn't have any real problems with the design, they just don't like
operator overloads.

Things like ext-decimal and GMP are always going to be clunky and annoying
to use without them though. It's one of the reasons I considered writing my
own implementation of a decimal scalar for core after my operator overload
RFC was declined. The use case for a scalar decimal type is much stronger
since nothing like it can be remotely implemented in userland at all. (I
know from experience, I wrote from scratch the most comprehensive arbitrary
precision math library in PHP.)

Jordan

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