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Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 20:37:40 +0200
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To: Oleku Konko <oleku.konko@yahoo.com>
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	"internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Scalar Type Casting Magic Methods
From: nikita.ppv@gmail.com (Nikita Popov)

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On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 5:31 PM, Oleku Konko <oleku.konko@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Quick Observations :
>
> I had this issue (
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16375331/increment-on-tostring ) and
> it kept me thinking why no error was returned, then i stumble up this RFC :
>  https://wiki.php.net/rfc/object_cast_to_types
>
> The patch is basic , simple and working and it should
> be seriously considered in 5.5.  I want to  believe if
> https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/334 can make it to PHP 5.5 then we
> should give object_cast_to_types the same opportunity except they are
> string objections why it should not be so
>

I don't think that this would be particularly useful and as such I don't
think we need it. The idea of doing some meaningful operation when writing
$obj + 1 is nice, but only if you have actual operator overloading and can
compute the result of that expression yourself. If you don't have this
possibility and only get to cast $a to an integer/float, then the whole
thing becomes rather useless. The only thing it could be used for are thin
wrappers around integers/floats and I don't see why one would want to do
such a thing (especially as you get back a number and *not* a wrapper
object).

Thus, __toScalar(), __toInt(), __toFloat() seem pretty useless. The only
thing that might have some merit is __toArray(). But there again, I'm not
really sure what it gives us. After all we already have Traversable and
ArrayAccess, so we can already make an object behave pretty much like an
array.

Nikita

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