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Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:16:38 +0100
Cc: Christopher Vogt <christopher.vogt@rwth-aachen.de>,
 internals@lists.php.net
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Grafts, Traits, horizontal reuse
From: php@stefan-marr.de (Stefan Marr)

Hi,

On 25 Nov 2008, at 13:39, Marcus Boerger wrote:
>
> Your points are all well observed. And yes I limit what my approach  
> can
> do in order to Keep It Simple Safe (KISS). While still being able to
> manually interfere with/overload the autogenerated code when  
> necessary.
> At the same time forcing to delegate to a defined Interface and not
> allowing to rename on the fly prevents abusing the functionality and
> helps maintainability. On the other hand it forces you to think before
> coding as this approach comes with a lack of functionality.

Ok, but now we start to talk about two clearly different things.
On the one hand something like traits, mixins, or what ever, and  
restricted syntax sugar for delegation on the other hand.

While designing grafts, the idea was to provide a similar power like  
traits do, but introducing state and encapsulation. From my point of  
view, there is no other way to achieve this. At least I have not found  
it.
All things in between, like "unbreakable traits" add more complexity  
then they solve problems.

So actually, we are somewhere near the point which I intended to reach  
with my proposal.

The questions we should answer now are:
   - Does PHP need horizontal reuse?
   - Do we go for an explicit solution? (traits)
   - Do we go for some sort of syntax sugar for delegation? (grafts,  
delegate keyword)
   - Or do we go the implicit way? (mixins, phyton multiple-inheritance)

Nevertheless, I would love to get some more comments on grafts before  
answering this questions, because this could give additional insights  
in the real problems with this approach and some ideas for improvements.

Best Regards
Stefan