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To: "Jordi Boggiano" <j.boggiano@seld.be>,
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Date: Sun, 3 Apr 2011 01:54:59 +0300
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Adding a more logical string slicing function to PHP
From: sv_forums@fmethod.com ("Stan Vass")

> Looking at JavaScript which acts quite similarly to the proposed
> approach, the Number methods [1] are not many and not often useful,
> but still they exist. What happens if you do "3.3"->ceil() ? If ceil()
> exists only in \numeric, you could say autoconvert, but if it exists
> in both \string and \numeric we have a problem, so the only sensible
> way is to drop type juggling for those autoboxed objects imo. Which is
> also what JS does btw. If you have an ambiguous value on your hands,
> you should cast it (x.toString() or parseInt(x)) first and then call
> what you want to call on it. Another interesting to note is that JS
> doesn't allow method calls directly on numbers - 3.toPrecision(2) for
> example is a syntax error, you have to put it in a var first. I guess
> it's not a problem since you should just inline the value you want
> anyway, the Number methods don't do super fancy things.
>
> Anyway, I hope this helps, my point is just that you shouldn't forget
> to check out how other languages solved the issue before hitting the
> wall ourselves. Not saying we have to do it all like JS, but they have
> something that works, so it's worth studying.
>
> Jordi Boggiano

We could use the library organization of JS, in that purely math-related 
methods like 'ceil', 'sin' etc., constants like PI, E etc. will be in 
namespace \math and take any scalar numeric input. As a lot of them take 
more than one arguments, and the arguments are sometimes commutative, it 
makes less sense to present those ones in particular as methods.

The few number methods that make sense as methods can then be in the scalar 
API. Almost like JS but not quite. Since's PHP's interpretation of types is 
slightly different than JS, we can surely take a page from JS, that's good 
(and I support it) but it needs to be nudged more towards PHP's PoV.

Re. number literals, (3).toPrecision(2) works in JS, I guess they wanted to 
avoid some ambiguity in the parser, ex. 3.0.toPrecision(2).

Stan Vass