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Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 20:13:21 +0100
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To: Ralph Schindler <ralph@ralphschindler.com>
Cc: internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] 5.4's New De-referencing plus assignment
From: nikita.ppv@googlemail.com (Nikita Popov)

To me the main problem here is that $bar =3D ($foo =3D new Foo)->bar()
simply doesn't make much sense. It is equivalent to:
$foo =3D new Foo;
$bar =3D $foo->bar();
Which is much cleaner and easier to understand.

The plain (new Foo)->bar() syntax *is* useful for cases like (new
ReflectionClass($class))->implementsInterface('Foo'), where you need
only one single bit of information from a class.

Nikita

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:02 PM, Ralph Schindler
<ralph@ralphschindler.com> wrote:
> Nikita,
>
> You're completely right about the expanded expressions, but I'm not sure =
its
> an edge-case per-se.
>
> The problem with the current syntax is that the resultant of the 'new'
> operation is lost UNLESS your chained method returns $this - which IMO ma=
kes
> it about as 1/2 as useful as it really could be.
>
> In the case of "new" though, the resultant is always an object, it seems
> like it should be permissible to change the parser to allow for variable
> assignment of the target object.
>
> I think for people just trying out this new behavior (by seeing it in the
> release notes as (new Foo)->bar()), the next logical thing is to try this
> syntax:
>
> =A0($foo =3D new Foo)->bar()
>
> =A0// OR in bison
> =A0'(' variable '=3D' new_expr ')'
>
> I did it, and I see other people doing it too. So I guess the question is=
...
> "how edge case is this edge case?" :)