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Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:15:48 -0400
Message-ID: <CADqTB_iDzWw4y0iVz2=MGdCPFPeisE933YKMz2Sm9pmMexfmKw@mail.gmail.com>
To: Lazare Inepologlou <linepogl@gmail.com>
Cc: Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com>, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com>, 
	PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] property de-referencing
From: rasmus@mindplay.dk (Rasmus Schultz)

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I suggested something similar earlier:

http://marc.info/?t=3D136327849600002&r=3D1&w=3D2

However, I withdrew that idea, because I came to the realization that, for
practical applications, you usually need the object-context coupled with
the member-reference to do anything really useful.

A form-input abstraction, for example, needs the object-context to reflect
on the class, the property-reference to reflect on annotations (maybe) and
of course the property-value, plus the ability to apply a posted value back
onto to the object-property.

The proposed feature facilitates all of that.

At the risk of starting a separate discussion, the recently added
ClassName::class constant provides a way to statically reference a class,
which frankly has very few practical applications in comparison - the need
to reference properties is usually much more prevalent and repetitive than
the need to reference a class; assuming your classes have more than one
property each, heh. The feature as such is also somewhat crippled, since
what comes out of it is a string and not a class-reference.

It solves the problems of static class-references of course, so that's
positive - but where's the much more critical property-reference
counterpart? Because this feature overloads class-constant syntax, there is
no obvious counterpart for properties. It seems pretty short-sighted. If
referencing a class statically is necessary and important enough to make it
into the language, why are property-references considered less important or
valuable?

Try to think of these features in terms of completing or complementing the
fairly limited static side of an otherwise mostly dynamic language, rather
than as features intended to solve a specific programming problem as such.

I think there is still a pretty strong case for static property-references,
but since any new language-feature is generally a pretty hard sell around
here, I'm letting this one go for now.

The immediate impact and benefits of static object-property references
ought to be a much easier sell - it has pretty broad applications, and can
probably replace a lot of simple inline function-closures, and eliminate a
lot of double-arguments (object and property-name) from many
popular/mainstream libraries.

If you disagree, please explain by example. I've already put a lot of time
into thinking about this and explaining it pretty carefully. If you're
opposed for more than personal reasons, surely you can offer more than a
flippant one-line backlash? :-)


On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 6:20 PM, Lazare Inepologlou <linepogl@gmail.com>wro=
te:

>
>
> 2013/4/30 Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com>
>
>> On 04/30/2013 01:58 PM, Stas Malyshev wrote:
>> > Hi!
>> >
>> >> I'm proposing we need a way to statically reference an object propert=
y
>> -
>> >> the object property itself, not it's value:
>> >
>> > You probably have use case for that, and it should be pretty easy to
>> > write a class that does that, but why it should be in the language? It
>> > certainly doesn't look like something sizeable portion of PHP devs wou=
ld
>> > do frequently.
>>
>> It is certainly not worth overloading the XOR operator for.
>>
>> -Rasmus
>>
>>
> In C#, they had the intention to introduce the operator infoof(...) to ge=
t
> the reflection, not only of properties, but of virtually everything in th=
e
> language. They abandoned the idea because it is really hard to do that fo=
r
> overloaded functions and they did not want to do all that work for a half
> baked feature:
>
>
> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2009/05/21/in-foof-we-trust-a=
-dialogue.aspx
>
> However, PHP does not have overloaded functions, which makes things
> significantly easier, so maybe it is worth examining the idea.
>
>
> Lazare INEPOLOGLOU
> Ing=E9nieur Logiciel
>
>

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