Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:70290
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain ajf.me designates 192.64.116.196 as permitted sender)
Message-ID: <528FB534.6000605@ajf.me>
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 19:49:08 +0000
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.1.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Tjerk Meesters <tjerk.meesters@gmail.com>, 
 PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
References: <CAHMUw2EmaofC=An8o=QrjnHAmdmtjprnCi69sRjMYcPDy37TDg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAHMUw2EmaofC=An8o=QrjnHAmdmtjprnCi69sRjMYcPDy37TDg@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Power function as operator
From: ajf@ajf.me (Andrea Faulds)



On 22/11/13 16:58, Tjerk Meesters wrote:
>
> It introduces the pow() function as an operator ** (double asterisk), as
> can be found in languages such as Python (with perhaps the notable
> difference that it's right associative there).
>

This is great! I like Python's ** operator and having it in PHP would be 
great too. It's a very versatile mathematical operator. With ** you get 
three for the price of one: You can do powers ($x ** 2), you can do 
square roots ($x ** (1/2)) and you can do reciprocals ($x ** -1), though 
for that last one there was already 1 / $x.

I will definitely vote for this proposal if it works and you make an RFC.

I do have one concern, however. It looks like your current pull request 
doesn't make gmp support it. Nikita's (nikic) proposal to add internal 
operator overloading so that the gmp library could support it has been 
merged in. So could you make it overloadable (if it isn't already), and 
make sure gmp supports it?

Thanks!
-- 
Andrea Faulds
http://ajf.me/