Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:95058
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: error (pb1.pair.com: domain lsces.co.uk from 217.147.176.230 cause and error)
To: internals@lists.php.net
References: <10fbcb03-5de8-4d9a-da1c-7e2bf77937cb@lsces.co.uk>
 <CAGa2bXZQtWpLGz4btOZ_+hYZrbkOEbBg9V2MvTHRMC6J1qU4OQ@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <d988b027-d9b8-cf08-9a3f-c5ae37eaa60c@lsces.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2016 08:51:20 +0100
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/45.2
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <CAGa2bXZQtWpLGz4btOZ_+hYZrbkOEbBg9V2MvTHRMC6J1qU4OQ@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Simple variable handling.
From: lester@lsces.co.uk (Lester Caine)

On 12/08/16 03:27, Yasuo Ohgaki wrote:
> It sounds you are looking for autoboxing (or at least something similar)
> 
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/autoboxing

That is interesting, and is probably something I would expect to come
out in the wash with making a more intelligent variable. Except with
PHP's loose casting style I would expect 'array_sum' to simply take a
loose cast numeric version of every element. The tidy I think I am
looking for is that 'is_num' rules on each variable would control the
result. if any is 'null' the result is 'null' in normal SQL practice, or
switch strict mode on and the first 'is_num' that fails throws an exception.

> I like this proposal, BTW. I'm not sure performance impact, though.

What I am still missing is an understanding of just how the global
library of functions which act on a variable works internally with the
'list' of declared variables. People keep saying 'you just create a new
object' but in my book still that object is a fixed set of code - the
code library - and a variable set of data - the variable. Yes if the
variable now has a flag which says 'constrained' then there will be an
additional set of data with the constraints and as Rowan says, one has
to decide where that is processed and what you do with the result, but
the global code will check the 'constraint' element and see 'null' if it
has not been processed, valid, or some failure message such as 'over
limit'.

CURRENTLY the constraint element is handled in user code working with a
data set provided by docblock or other external storage means, SQL
schema for example. From a performance point of view I still prefer that
a lot of this is done in the IDE and that IS managing a lot of what we
are talking about and has been since the 2004 date of that rfc. But
almost every form I code on every website has a set of rules to
constrain each input and that data needs to be used in the code to
validate the variables being created, so isn't now the time to simply
add global functions that provide a single built in standard for
handling this problem?

From a practical point of view of cause, the validation of inputs may
well be done in the browser so that the constraints get passed TO some
html5 check, or javascript function. So having uploaded the form one
COULD simply tag a variable as valid? Or run the PHP validation as a
safety check. All of this is workflow and that workflow could include a
simple array function on the input array, but that still requires that
there are a set of constraint rules for each element of the array ...
applied to each variable ... so why can't we simply improve the variable?

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk
Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk