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Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2015 18:25:32 +0100
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To: Anthony Ferrara <ircmaxell@gmail.com>
Cc: "S.A.N" <ua.san.alex@gmail.com>, internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Add support $object::class
From: ocramius@gmail.com (Marco Pivetta)

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On 27 April 2015 at 16:35, Anthony Ferrara <ircmaxell@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 7:18 AM, S.A.N <ua.san.alex@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Now this code causes an error PHP 5-7.
> >
> > PHP Parse:
> > Syntax error, unexpected 'class' (T_CLASS), expecting identifier
> > (T_STRING) or variable (T_VARIABLE) or '{' or '$'
> >
> > Do not want to use get_class($object)
>
> Why not?
>
> Seriously, why not? ::class was added because there was no easy way to
> get from the symbol class name to the string representation of it (you
> couldn't pass it to a function, etc since it would look like a
> constant). So ::class is a purely compile time construct to turn a
> literal classname into a string representation.


Mainly due to overhead.

Having `::class` accessible even for objects and variables containing class
names would be very efficient, as it saves us a method call for an
operation that really doesn't need one.

Systems that depend on `get_class()` a lot would benefit from such a
feature: see for example mapping caches in data mappers and handlers
matching in event handlers.

Marco Pivetta

http://twitter.com/Ocramius

http://ocramius.github.com/

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