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To: Stanislav Malyshev <stas@zend.com>
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Date: 23 Jun 2003 11:57:59 -0400
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] ADT, SPL
From: sterling@bumblebury.com (Sterling Hughes)

On Mon, 2003-06-23 at 03:34, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
> SB>> > Anybody cares to explain what SPL is?
> SB>> 
> SB>>   http://cvs.php.net/cvs.php/spl
> 
> >From the initial look at the code, it seems it contains a large parts of 
> duplicated engine code. Which means, unless I am missing something, 
> constant maintenance nightmare. Can't it be done without keeping another 
> copy of entire Zend engine?

SPL, or at least the parts I'm interested in provide a standard set of
interfaces for PHP5, and then it overloads certain ops to allow for, for
example, foreach() overloading.  So you can do:

class PHP_Devs implements spl_iterator {
  function next() {
     return $nextphpdev;
  }
}

$p = new PHP_Devs;

foreach ($p as $dev) { 
  echo $p;
}

This stuff is very useful, especially internally (its actually only the
internal ramifications that i personally care about).  Imagine
developing a database extension, where you can go:

$result = $sth->result;
foreach ($result as $row) {
  echo $row[0];
}

And *every* part of that is overloaded, and lazy initialized.  That
provides a great speed boost compared to the traditional database
extensions (you save a lot of unnecessary function calls, and in some
cases, fetches).

Marcus can probably expound on some of the other features of SPL.

-Sterling

-- 
"Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems." 
    - Linus Torvalds