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Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2015 00:38:20 +0000
Message-ID: <CA+kxMuQovGZwrF9Er_a0CR9f6H5U6ZfRoDXokTvT08qFL6VM6A@mail.gmail.com>
To: Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com>
Cc: Michael Wallner <mike.php.net@gmail.com>, PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: [RFC] [DISCUSSION]: Closure from callable
From: danack@basereality.com (Dan Ackroyd)

On 4 October 2015 at 23:02, Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> That being said, I'm not sure how much need is for this - i.e. you can
> always make a closure by just doing function() { return $this->blah(); }
> if you need it.

As I said before (and as the RFC says), there are ways to work around
not having it. But having to duplicate code and keep it in sync is a
pain and indicates that something is missing from the language.

> And if we're into performance optimization

We're not. The performance stuff is nice side benefit, but it's not
the main aim of the RFC which is to make life easier for people who
want to create closures in PHP.

> But the bigger question would be why you need more
> specific type (Closure) instead of more generic (callable)

IMO it's actually the other way round; closures are more generic than callables.

To get the parameters of a closure via inspection you only ever need
to use ReflectionFunction. To get the parameters of a callable, you
need to figure out first what type of callable it is, and then either
use ReflectionFunction or ReflectionClass + ReflectionMethod as
appropriate.

And also callables are just a bit insane currently:

> Maybe we should fix $callable() then? :)

Maybe we should!

I announced a draft RFC a week ago:
http://news.php.net/php.internals/88545 Only one person (off list) has
given any feedback on it so far. I invite more feedback! Even if it's
just "that's an amazing RFC Dan, you've covered every possible aspect
of the changes that need to be discussed." that would still be good
feedback to get.

But as that RFC could only be introduced for PHP 8 at the earliest,
and callable still won't be as easy to work with as closures, the
feedback I have received is that people would very much appreciate
having this RFC for 7.1

cheers
Dan