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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Feature request and RFC
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

Thomas Gielfeldt wrote on 02/03/2015 07:43:
> 2015-02-24 17:17 GMT+01:00 Thomas Gielfeldt <thomas@gielfeldt.dk>:
>
>> Hi internals.
>>
>> I've made PR proposing a feature request: A new interface Sortable.
>>
>> https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/1116
>>
>> If possible, I would like to create and RFC describing this in more
>> detail, and perhaps get a voting on.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Br,
>>
>> Thomas Gielfeldt
>>
>>
> The 2nd PR I made addresses this (https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/1123),
> exposing 3 much simpler interfaces depending on what the user wants/needs
> to implement, which combined covers all the 11 sort functions.
>
> Also, the point of this/these interface(s) is to provide the same power
> that some of the other SPL interfaces have (Countable, Serializable,
> ArrayAccess, Iterator, etc.). That is, using native functions with objects
> possessing certain capabilities.


I don't think a container should be expected to reimplement something as 
specific as a case-insensitive natural string comparison; its job should 
be to do the actual sorting of data.

I suggest a single interface with 3 methods: sortValues($cmp_function), 
sortValuesAssoc($cmp_function), and sortKeys($cmp_function): 
https://gist.github.com/IMSoP/4ea904203eadf8d5859a

This maintains the obvious connection between userland functions and the 
method called, and keeps the userland implementation much lower on 
boilerplate. Conveniently, a collection which internally stores data in 
an array can pass the callback directly to usort/uasort/uksort for a 
trivial implementation.

Obviously, this means more implementation needed on the engine side, in 
that it needs to expose callback functions for the various different 
comparisons, but I think that's where the comparison logic belongs.

Regards,
-- 
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]