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Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:45:05 -0700
Message-ID: <CAMAZfpaY9KCuB=h8KF_c3gTnhGsf15swC9BJe5=sAZJ6fKB9Mw@mail.gmail.com>
To: Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@googlemail.com>
Cc: Dmitri Snytkine <dsnytkine@ultralogistics.com>, internals@lists.php.net
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Any chance of having __invokeStatic()
From: me@evancoury.com (Evan Coury)

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 1:11 PM, Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@googlemail.com> wrote:
> How would this be different from defining a function MyClass?

Actually, I just found myself wanting this the other day. The class
name in question was being defined in a config file, which the user
would be free to override with their own class name (and a closure was
ruled out because this config file could be xml/ini/etc). There are
plenty of other ways I decided I could work around this, but I did
stop and think that something like __invokeStatic() would be nice.

My main rationale for wanting this was that classes can be resolved
via an autoloader, whereas functions cannot.

However, I could definitely see where this could get sticky. For example:

<?php

function MyClass() {
    return true;
}

abstract class MyClass {
    public static function __invokeStatic()
    {
        return false;
    }
}

$className = 'MyClass';

var_dump($className());

?>

What would the output be in a case like this? Right now, while it's
horrible practice to share names across functions and classes, they
don't actually share the same namespace. Something like
__invokeStatic() would make it ambiguous in some cases (like above),
so I'm not really sure how that could be resolved.

--
Evan Coury