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Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2012 13:06:24 -0400
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To: Patrick ALLAERT <patrickallaert@php.net>
Cc: Amaury Bouchard <amaury@amaury.net>, internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RFC proposal - Syntactic sugar for cloning
From: pierrick@webstart.fr (Pierrick Charron)

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I also agree with Johannes.

Pierrick

On 29 June 2012 11:01, Patrick ALLAERT <patrickallaert@php.net> wrote:

> 2012/6/29 Amaury Bouchard <amaury@amaury.net>:
> > Hello everybody,
> >
> > It's the first time I write on the internals mailing-list, so let me
> > introduce myself quickly. I'm a french and canadian CTO, working in
> Paris.
> > I lead some PHP projects (mainly the Temma framework and FineFS data
> > replication system).
> > I begin to learn PHP's internal engine, backed by Pierrick Charron.
> >
> > I would like to do an RFC proposal (see below for the associated patch).
> > I was thinking about "what if PHP was a full-object language?". Like, for
> > example, how will we write the simplest code, assuming that objects are
> > handled using pointers since PHP 5.
> >
> > Take a look at this code:
> >   $a = 3;
> >   $b = $a;
> >   $a++;
> >
> > $b still contains the value 3.
> >
> > Now, if we imagine that even the integer data type is managed in an
> object,
> > the same code will produce two pointers to the same object. Thus, $b will
> > have the value 4, as $a.
> > So, in this imaginary world, we would need to do a lot of object
> cloning. I
> > wondered how this could be less painful, and I thought about the Pascal
> > language's affectation operator (:=).
> >
> > Then we would be able to write something like that:
> >   $a = 3;
> >   $b := $a;
> >   $c = $a;
> >   $a++;
> >
> > $a equals 4, as $c. But $b equals 3.
> >
> > Back in the real world, we are not cloning objects very often. But, like
> > many other syntactic sugars (as the short array syntax), I think it could
> > be handy in some circumstances.
> >
> > There is a patch for this evolution, written by Pierrick.
> > Full source code: https://github.com/adoy/php-src/tree/amaury-clone
> > Code diff:
> >
> https://github.com/adoy/php-src/commit/5107c0355c50381c7e67230cdc9f563eb3936a15
> >
> >
> > I'm looking forward to your advices.
> >
> > Cheers!
> >
> > Amaury
>
> Hi Amaury,
>
> I have to agree with Johannes here, it looks like a benefit only in a
> very few cases but introduces a lot of side changes like IDE syntax
> parsing, to cite only one.
> I really doubt the little benefit of such a change outperforms the
> extra work involved.
>
> Cheers,
> Patrick
>
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