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Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:15:14 +0100
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Subject: Closures and $this
From: chris_se@gmx.net (Christian Seiler)

Hi,

since a few months have passed since the last discussion on this topic
and perhaps people had time to gather some experience with the current
closure implementation in PHP 5.3 I'd like to restart the debate on
$this in closures and object extension.

Foreword: The discussion should center on the future behaviour of PHP 6
ONLY. Whether or not a backport is even possible (binary compability
etc.) or should even be done should be topic of a separate discussion
and should *NOT* influence the decision. The ONLY goal of this
discussion should be to agree on a SANE way of implementing $this for
closures for PHP 6.

I've updated the original RFC I wrote a tiny bit (I didn't change much):

<http://wiki.php.net/rfc/closures/object-extension>

The basic outline is the following:

 * In the first section I explain the general issue.
 * In the second section I show the proposals that were made on
   internals@ before I wrote the RFC.
 * In the third section I compare the approaches and explain why
   the approaches (B) and (D) are inconsistent.
 * In the fourth section I propose a new approach (bindTo) that
   was only briefly discussed after the original RFC.

Please read the complete RFC and try to understand the points I'm trying
to make. If something is unclear, *please* ask first. In the past
discussion I had the impression that a lot of people understood only
partial aspects of the problem which made the discussion extremely
noisy. I believe that is a disservice to the issue. However, now we have
the huge advantage of NOT having an immanent deadline for a release. I
hope this will enable a consensus on this issue.

Discuss away!

Regards,
Christian