Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:65696
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain gmail.com designates 209.85.216.47 as permitted sender)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Sender: ekneuss@gmail.com
In-Reply-To: <CALrkBjZ1Jb9k1=b8uyqbmaMojw06vSaAZCMfDU3LnXGP2cWEMw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CALrkBjZ1Jb9k1=b8uyqbmaMojw06vSaAZCMfDU3LnXGP2cWEMw@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2013 17:42:39 +0100
Message-ID: <CACQesk6dr8+0CkAgZOca5L=PipdPbt8sSFf_qvUn7r5pjqXnYg@mail.gmail.com>
To: Mike Willbanks <pencap@gmail.com>
Cc: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=20cf3074d6b4df04a004d5110496
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] ArrayAccess/ArrayObject return by reference
From: colder@php.net (Etienne Kneuss)

--20cf3074d6b4df04a004d5110496
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

I assume it would be possible technically but might break (at least by
issuing E_STRICT) a lot of code if we forced ArrayObject::offsetGet to
return a reference.

Think of all the subclasses that extend ArrayObject who currently do not do
that?

Other than that, returning a ref where it previously didn't can have all
kinds of undesirable and hard-to-track consequences.

Best,


On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 4:27 PM, Mike Willbanks <pencap@gmail.com> wrote:

> Looking at: http://lxr.php.net/xref/PHP_5_5/Zend/zend_interfaces.c#538 it
> seems that ArrayAccess at the moment can not be returned by a reference.
>  I'm wondering if there was a technical reason behind this or if it is now
> a BC reason?
>
> Anyhow; I was attempting to dig through the source code a bit more last
> night to see why ArrayObject could not overload the function declaration of
> offsetGet to force a return by reference aka: function &offsetGet($key)...
> which works now for ArrayAccess but not for ArrayObject.  I believe it has
> to deal with ArrayObject inheriting ArrayAccess?  Is there a way to allow
> ArrayObject to change the function declaration in this way?  My PHP
> internals skills are not the best which is the reason for the question.
>
> Anyhow; justification wise: in userland this leads to a lot of wtf factor.
>  It really comes down to having to provide our own implementation of
> ArrayObject by extending several different areas including ArrayAccess so
> that references can be returned so multi-dimensional arrays can be properly
> unset aka:
> $ar = new ArrayObject(array('foo' => array('bar' => array('baz' =>
> 'foo'))));
> unset($ar['foo']['bar']['baz']);
>
> Regards,
>
> Mike
>



-- 
Etienne Kneuss
http://www.colder.ch

--20cf3074d6b4df04a004d5110496--