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Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2024 14:14:43 +0100 (BST)
To: Bilge <bilge@scriptfusion.com>
cc: internals@lists.php.net
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] First time contributor (DateTime::setDate PR)
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From: derick@php.net (Derick Rethans)

Hi,

On Sun, 31 Mar 2024, Bilge wrote:

> About the PR: I sometimes find it would be useful to only update part of the
> date. The PR makes all parameters to DateTime(Immutable)::setDate
> <https://www.php.net/manual/en/datetimeimmutable.setdate.php> optional in a
> backwards-compatible manner such that we can elect to update only the day,
> month, year or any combination of the three (thanks, in part, to named
> parameters). Without this modification, we must always specify all of the day,
> month and year parameters to change the date.

As I mentioned to you in Room 11, I am not in favour of adhoc API 
changes to Date/Time classes. It has now been nearly 18 years since they 
were originally introduced, and they indeed could do with an overhaul.

I have been colllecting ideas in 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pxPSRbfATKE4TFWw72K3p7ir-02YQbTf3S3SIxOKWsk/edit#heading=h.2jol7kfhmijb

Having different/better modifiers would also be a good thing to talk 
about, albeit perhaps on the four mentioned new classes, instead of 
adding them to the already existing DateTime and DateTimeImmutable 
classes.

In any case, just allowing setDate to be able to just modify the month 
is going to introduce confusion, as this will be counter intuitive:

$dt = new DateTimeImmutable("2024-03-31");
$newDt = $dt->setDate( month: 2 );

It is now representing 2024-03-02.

This might be the right answer, but it might also be that the developer 
just cared about the month part (and not the day-of-month), in which 
case this is a WTF moment.

Picking mofication APIs is not as trivial as it seems, and I would like 
to do it *right*.

Feel free to add comments and wishes to the google doc document. In the 
near future, I will be writing up an RFC from this.

cheers,
Derick

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