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Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2010 22:57:41 +0800
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To: Derick Rethans <derick@php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RFC: Comparable interface
From: aharvey@php.net (Adam Harvey)

(Omnibus reply, since Johannes's original e-mail hasn't yet dropped
into my ever-so-flaky mail setup. I have read it in full on
news.php.net, though.)

> On Thu, 30 Sep 2010, Johannes Schl=C3=BCter wrote:
>> What is this "more interesting stuff to come"?

Nothing that's likely to be ready before the forthcoming release
cycle. I really did just want the RFC writing practice, since I
haven't done one within PHP's structure before. :)

>> (*) Right now it is quite clear what happens if you read
>> =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0$a =3D=3D $b
>> there are a few edge cases (0 =3D=3D "100000 mails ina thread") but over=
all
>> quite clear. With your patch "anything" might happen, which is hard to
>> detect as we don't enforce strong typing, which would give a hint.

Sure, but I think by that argument interfaces like Countable,
Traversable and ArrayAccess would be out too. It is syntactic sugar,
but I think it's useful syntactic sugar.

One of the examples I toyed with tossing into the RFC was a date
class, but I figured the argument against that is the obvious one of
"people would use DateTime anyway". I think there are a range of
potential uses here.

2010/9/30 Derick Rethans <derick@php.net>:
> It sounds a little bit like operator over loading to me...

I guess it is in a sense, since the comparison operators are by
definition operators. I don't really see this is as starting any sort
of slippery slope towards a full operator overloading implementation,
though -- it's limited in scope, and really seems like a small,
logical feature to make objects a little bit more useful to me.

Adam