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Date: 19 May 2003 09:16:33 -0400
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Subject: Code References
From: sterling@bumblebury.com (Sterling Hughes)

Hi,

I figure I'll just throw this out into the wilderness, I want closures
and function pointers in PHP.  In other words I want the ability to do:

$var = function ($a, $b) {
    return $a + $b;
};

And then $var can contain a code reference to the anonymous function. 
Having code references is an infinitely useful feature in my experience,
and I know other people have some really cool uses of closures for
lightweight templating (with mod_perl.) [1]

I'd also like function pointers, which are optimized callbacks of some
sort, so you can go:

function my_compare($a, $b) {
   if ($a > $b) return 1;
   if ($a < $b) return -1;
   return 0;
}

sort($ar, <my_compare>);

And compare doesn't need to be resolved at runtime, but rather can be a
compile time feature.

-Sterling

[1] I say code references on purpose.  This doesn't need to mean full
fledged closures, which are probably overkill (although, they would be
nice too ;)

-- 
"That stuff's easy compared to installing Horde" 
    - Alan Knowles, In response to my applause for creating a LALR 
    parser for PHP.