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Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2015 10:21:35 -0600
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To: Philip Sturgeon <pjsturgeon@gmail.com>
Cc: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Anonymous Classes
From: leverton@gmail.com (Matthew Leverton)

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 7:52 AM, Philip Sturgeon <pjsturgeon@gmail.com> wrote:
> Good day!
>
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/anonymous_classes
>
> There's a little RFC + patch that Joe Watkins put together, and as
> before with the ArrayOf RFC, I'll be helping out.
>
> So, lets get this discussion rolling.
>
Anonymous classes open up slightly new ways to do things. I like to
write a lot of small classes for the purposes of DI and re-usability.
Because of that, the code often looks like:

$foo = new Foo($depend1, $depend2, function() {
  return 'my custom behavior';
});

That's fine when there's only one callback needed, but beyond that it
breaks down. This becomes more readable:

abstract class Foo
{
 ...
}

$foo = new class($depend1, $depend2) extends Foo {
  public function doFoo() {
  }
  public function doBar() {
  }
}

These cases for me are always single-use for the scope of the
application, and often it's inside configuration blocks that are
custom per environment. I have no need to name the class other than
PHP doesn't support anonymous ones.

I'm +1 on the concept, depending on what the maintenance impact that
this would bring to PHP's core. There are enough other ways to
accomplish the same goals that I don't think this is "must have", even
though I'd definitely use it.

Regarding this syntax (from other discussions on the list):

$foo = class { };

I think if such a thing were supported, maybe $foo would just be a
ReflectionClass object. (I haven't really thought that one through...)

--
Matthew Leverton