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Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 20:52:09 +0000
To: Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com>,internals@lists.php.net
Message-ID: <4E4F7392-154C-4282-8D5D-553194D09DCE@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC][VOTE] Objects as Keys
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

On 16 December 2014 18:50:06 GMT, Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com> wrote:
>Hi!
>
>> Explicit conversion is trivial, just call whatever method you like.
>> Sure, you can't write (int)$obj, but $obj->toInt() is just as
>> expressive.
>
>Exactly the same applies to __toString and whole ArrayAccess, yet we
>still have them. Avoiding boilerplate code helps. Especially if
>boilterplate code would look like:
>
>if(is_object($foo)) {
>  $foo_key = $foo->toInt();
>} else {
> $foo_key = $foo;
>}
>$a[$foo] = 1;
>
>Doing it each time is annoying.

I was just confused by your statement that "explicit conversion is inacessible from userspace". But yeah, I guess with string keys you can just write $a[(string)$foo] and assume/hope it will do something meaningful whatever the type of $foo.