Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:46823
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain zend.com designates 212.25.124.185 as permitted sender)
Message-ID: <4B55FA44.1060601@zend.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:30:28 -0800
Organization: Zend Technologies
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091204 Lightning/1.0b2pre Thunderbird/3.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: internals@lists.php.net
References: <4B54FC87.8070106@zend.com> <4B55EE56.8040104@lerdorf.com>
In-Reply-To: <4B55EE56.8040104@lerdorf.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] function call chaining
From: stas@zend.com (Stanislav Malyshev)

Hi!

> I don't mind the foo()() syntax, especially now that we have closures.
> But people are right, we have a longstanding feature request for
> $foo()[0] as well, so if we start down this path of adding chaining, we
> should do that one as well and see if any others make sense.

As I said, that was next on my TODO (which doesn't make a promise of 
delivering it soon, that depends on so many external circumstances :)

> Not sure the {} expression syntax is needed.  What sort of expressions
> do you see being useful here that would need the braces?  Stuff like
> $a[$idx]() works today without needing any extra syntax.  Are you

This is one of the reasons why I wanted to have ()() to work - you can 
do $myMethods['foo']() but as soon as you go from that to 
getMyMethod('foo') you have to have temp vars. It's an ugly style.

> thinking along the lines of:
>
> {strtolower($a[$idx])}()

No, that is probably not very useful or nice. Only use I'd see as 
interesting would be either distinguishing between $foo->method() and 
($foo->propertyContainingClosure)() and alike.

> or something like that?  That would make the "I hate linefeeds and
> semi-colons" crowd happy, I guess.

That's more about extra statements than about linefeeds and semicolons. 
People like to speak in full expressive sentences, not. In chunks. Each 
of which. Expresses only small. Part of. The whole meaning. Of the 
sentence. You can feel the difference, right?

I, personally, felt the need to do ()() as soon as I started playing 
with closures, since when you do that, you very soon having functions 
returning closures, and that very soon leads to needing to call whatever 
function fetching closure returned.
Of course, you can get too far with it, just as you can get too far with 
run-on sentences. Just as in prose, one has to watch his style.
-- 
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas@zend.com   http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829   MSN: stas@zend.com