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Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2013 23:15:17 +0000
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Proposal for RFC: get_class_constants()
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

On 15/12/2013 21:12, Crypto Compress wrote:
> Hi,
>
> a short fairy tale:
> For a long time thePHPway™ was to build a function for everything 
> someone needed/could imagine. This is why PHP is so easy, effective 
> and triumphant. But somehow the highlander principle found it's way 
> into PHP and nothing will ever be as it was before. So flog the 
> reflection argument to death.
>
> http://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg64242.html
>
> Cheers!
> cryptocompress
>

Buried in the excessive snark of this message is a useful piece of 
information: the proposal has come up before, and an implementation was 
even provided, along with a few use cases which might benefit from the 
small performance improvement of having a direct implementation separate 
from the full ReflectionClass.

It also reminded me of another use case: exceptions. Since the "code" of 
an Exception has to be an integer, writing a readable summary of an 
exception to a text-only log is tricky: if you just echo the code 
itself, you'd have to go back to the source code (or phpdoc) to look up 
its meaning. But when *constructing* an Exception, you will generally 
use a class constant to specify the code. If you grab all the class 
constants of the particular Exception sub-class, you can - hopefully - 
find the one with the appropriate value, and write its name to the log, 
rather than the number.

That look-up may well happen every time you push an exception into the 
logging handler, so keeping it high-performance is probably a good idea. 
I suspect there are other slow points of such a function, but if 
constructing a ReflectionClass carries an inherent cost, it would be 
nice to avoid doing so.

Regards,

-- 
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]