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Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 17:26:25 -0500 (CDT)
To: "Stanislav Malyshev" <stas@zend.com>
Cc: "Wez Furlong" <wez@omniti.com>,
 "Sean Coates" <sean@caedmon.net>,
 internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PATCH: anonymous functions in PHP
From: ceo@l-i-e.com ("Richard Lynch")

On Mon, March 19, 2007 4:55 pm, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
>> You have to have a pretty esoteric function to need that kind of
>> scope
>> control, no?
>
> Depends on your background. Some people consider LISP intuitive
> language
> :) And if you work with Javascript, you probably would be doing it
> daily
> - most AJAX toolkits rely on heavy usage of anonymous functions. Not
> sure it needs to be in PHP though. It might be cool thing, but it's
> definitely becomes very confusing very fast.

I almost finished my MS in CS with Artificial Intelligence
concentration at DePaul, so I *was* one of those CS students with too
much time on my hands.

Then I worked at an AI think tank lab at Northwestern University for
most of a decade using Lisp.

I gotta say that while it was Really Nifty to know all about those
esoteric closures, curries, and whatnot I have since forgot, mostly, I
didn't need these things on a daily basis even at that job.

So, yes, somebody somewhere "needs" this, but is it the kind of thing
that belongs in PHP?

I think not.

By "this" I mean the ability to have the lexical closure carry its
scope around with itself.

I *WANT* to have a simple clean anonymous function syntax.

Can't you just take the body of "create_function" with the syntax of
the patch, and marry those two?

How does the current create_function handle this same scope issue?

-- 
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Know what I want?
I want you to buy a CD from some starving artist.
http://cdbaby.com/browse/from/lynch
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