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Date: Sat, 03 Mar 2012 18:27:13 -0800
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC - discussion] Object Scalar Type Casting Magic
 Methods
From: smalyshev@sugarcrm.com (Stas Malyshev)

Hi!

> I've drafted an RFC and functional-complete patch for disucssion
> another alternative to add scalar object casting magic methods.
>
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/object_cast_to_types
>
> Please review the RFC and attached patch, and start some discussion on
> this proposal.

Some notes:

1. Use cases for this are unclear. Wrapping scalar types does not seem 
very efficient as conversion is always one-directional - once you do any 
operation your type is gone, so unless you re-wrap it each time (at 
which point you could as well un-wrap it manually) it's not very useful.
Enabling passing SplFixedArray to array functions is very simple - as 
with any iterable type - just use iterator_to_array (if you don't have 
builtin convertor, which SplFixedArray does). But it's not always a good 
idea - since it creates a full copy. Both this method and your 
conversion do not have a context so it is not possible to avoid creating 
a full copy.

2. Having separate methods is probably not the best idea. It may lead to 
implementation having inconsistent conversions between types, such as 
floats and integers, etc. or having conversions to float but not int and 
getting very hard to debug errors because of that. Also may lead to 
conversion be context-dependent and create very confusing results.

3. There's already cast_object handler, why not use it? I'm not sure 
messing with get is a good idea, it's not exactly meant for that.

-- 
Stanislav Malyshev, Software Architect
SugarCRM: http://www.sugarcrm.com/
(408)454-6900 ext. 227