Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:62118
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain moonspot.net designates 72.5.90.26 as permitted sender)
Message-ID: <50280D37.10109@moonspot.net>
Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2012 15:08:23 -0500
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:14.0) Gecko/20120713 Thunderbird/14.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com>
CC: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
References: <CAF+90c_pRo6Xs2Cv9X-BN3mSnHi65gHHWzD8+yOnAPqgnWJm_w@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAF+90c_pRo6Xs2Cv9X-BN3mSnHi65gHHWzD8+yOnAPqgnWJm_w@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Generators
From: brian@moonspot.net (Brian Moon)

Hi Nikita,

I admit, I have ignored these threads as there was no RFC. So, some of 
this may have been covered.

Do you have a good example usage other than a file? I don't find 
fopen/fgets/fclose all that complicated. What are the other valid use 
cases for such a thing?

Also, not allowing rewinding is unintuitive for something that is an 
iterator in PHP. If I can foreach() it and I can call next() on it, I 
expect to be able to reset() it as well. IMO, you would need to issue a 
FATAL PHP error if that simply is not allowed. Or you have to have a 
second syntax for what to do in that case. At that point, you are 
implementing Iterator.

While I am glad that PHP has borrowed syntax from many languages, I find 
the yield keyword to be very WTF when I first saw it. It is also poorly 
explained in your RFC. You use terms like "sending and receiving". That 
does not say "returns from function execution" to me. I had to basically 
figure it out from the code examples.

Lastly, because you cite needing this for sending data to PHPUnit, I 
think this is a user land problem and not a core problem. In about 5 
minutes I implemented a reusable Generator object that does exactly what 
you need. http://pastebin.com/V336rEpR At least, it does what your 
examples show you need. Again, file IO is very easy and perhaps that 
example does not explain your true need very well.

Brian
brianlmoon@php.net
http://brian.moonspot.net/

On 8/11/12 8:42 AM, Nikita Popov wrote:
> Hi internals!
>
> I think there already was a lot of discussion on the generators, so
> it's time to move to the next step. I'd like to vote on the feature in
> two weeks, so this the "announce[ment] on internals@, by the author,
> with the intention of voting on it".
>
>      https://wiki.php.net/rfc/generators
>
> If you have any further feedback, now would be a good time to raise
> it. If there is something you previously posted, but which I didn't
> yet address, please let me know. There were around 150 mails and I
> sure missed some of them.
>
> Thanks,
> Nikita
>