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Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2013 00:27:09 +0200
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To: Sanford Whiteman <swhitemanlistens-software@cypressintegrated.com>
Cc: Ralf Lang <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] New feature: sequential constructors
From: florinpatan@gmail.com (Florin Patan)

On Wed, Jul 3, 2013 at 11:10 PM, Sanford Whiteman
<swhitemanlistens-software@cypressintegrated.com> wrote:
>
> > Not that it would be an argument but just for understanding: Do you know
> > any scripting language which has this?
>
> Dropping the "scripting" part... IIRC, C++ calls ctors without
> arguments automatically like in my 'sequentialBefore' napkin sketch.
>
> C# has language-level support for 'sequentialBefore' type logic in its
> initialization list as well (which helps to smooth away the anti-ness
> by keeping it out of the ctor code).
>
> Also, here's a fascinatingly stupid bug-as-feature in AS3 (which I
> don't remember anything about, having used it basically procedurally
> along time ago) http://blogs.adobe.com/cantrell/archives/2008/09/be_careful_how.html.
> (Call Super hoisting out of conditionals? How could that have seemed
> like a good idea?)
>
> So there is precedent for Contractual Call Super. I don't think the
> above implementations are ideal, though, so if someone did go down
> this path I think it should be (a) not automatic but dependent on
> keyword(s); (b) flexible as far as executing before/after; (c)
> deeply-thought-through as far as its impact on class hierarchies that
> expand and contract over time.
>
> -- S.
>
>
>
>
> --
> PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List
> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
>


Hello,


I've been thinking about this for a bit and even if you are right
about being nice to have a way to call a function always after
constructor. It could happen. You could have a DB class and in
constructor the user/pass/host/options and then a separate method for
init().
But more often than not, I want to be able to dictate what the program
is doing when I'm using libraries and so on that I'm extending, not
the libraries do stuff on their own. In most of the cases, I know much
better that the library author how I want to use the library for my
use case.
In your case, if you want to have a method always called then just
document it properly. Except for cases when you don't have access to
the source code, encrypted maybe?, I really don't see why just
documenting this isn't enough.
Think for a moment on the reverse of this: you have this nice feature
in the language, but then the people start abusing it. Could you
imagine yourself trying to use the latest XGreatLib v3.0 but you want
to skip some constructor due the fact that you know better. What do
you do then?
And yeah, maybe the library authors are not that careless to use such
an abusive functionality, but what if you have this in your code and
you decide to remove the new keyword 'super' or whatever so that you
can skip that constructor? Could it be that you just broke your whole
app because of this?
Please think of the downsides as well when thinking of new features
like this, the implications for the whole eco-system could be huge for
just wanting to skip some proper documentation.



Cheers.
----
Florin Patan
https://github.com/dlsniper
http://www.linkedin.com/in/florinpatan