Hello everybody,
the last days I have experimented a bit with operator overloading in
userspace classes (redefing the meaning of arithmetic operations like +, -,
*, etc. for your own classes).
This could be useful for different libraries which implements custom
arithmetic objects (like money values, tensors, etc.) or things like Symfony
string component (concatenate) operator, because it improves readability
much:
$x * ($a + $b) instead of $x->multiply($a->add($b))
4 years ago, there was a RFC about this topic (
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/operator-overloading
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/operator-overloading), which was discussed a bit (
https://externals.io/message/89967 https://externals.io/message/89967),
but there was no real Outcome.
I have tried to implement a proof of concept of the RFC, I encountered some
problems, when implementing the operator functions as (non-static) class
members and pass them only the other argument: What happens when we
encounter an expression like 2/$a and how can the class differ this from
$a/2. Also not every operation on every structure is e.g on commutative
(e.g. for matrices AB =/= BA). So I tried a C#-like approach, where the
operator implementations are static functions in the class, and both
arguments are passed. In my PHP implementation this would look something
like this:
Class X {
public static function __add($lhs, $rhs) {
//...
}
}
The class function can so decide what to do, based on both operands (so it
can decide if the developer wrote 2/$a or $a/2). Also that way an
implementor can not return $this by accident, which could lead to unintended
side effect, if the result of the operation is somehow mutated.
I have taken over the idea of defining a magic function for each operation
(like Python does), because I think that way it is the clearest way to see,
what operators a class implements (could be useful for static analysis). The
downside to this approach is that this increases the number of magic
functions highly (my PoC-code defines 13 additional magic functions, and the
unary operators are missing yet), so some people in the original discussion
suggest to define a single (magic) function, where the operator is passed,
and the user code decides, what to do. Advantageous is very extensible (with
the right parser implementation, you could even define your own new
operators), with the cost that this method will become very complex for data
structures which use multiple operators (large if-else or switch
constructions, which delegate the logic to the appropriate functions). An
other idea mentioned was to extract interfaces with common functionality
(like Arithmetically, Comparable, etc.) like done with the ArrayAccess or
Countable interfaces. The problem that I see here, is that this approach is
rather unflexible and it would be difficult to extract really universal
interfaces (e.g. vectors does not need a division (/) operation, but the
concatenation . could be really useful for implementing dot product). This
would lead to either that only parts of the interfaces are implemented (and
the other just throw exceptions) or that the interfaces contain only one or
two functions (so we would have many interfaces instead of magic functions
in the end).
On the topic which operators should be overloadable: My PoC-implementation
has magic functions for the arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /, %, **), string
concatenation (.), and bit operations (>>, <<, &, |, ^). Comparison and
equality checks are implement using a common __compare() function, which
acts like an overload of the spaceship operator. Based if -1, 0 or +1 is
returned by the comparison operators (<, >, <=, >=, ==) are evaluated. I
think this way we can enforce, that the assumed standard logic (e.g
!($a<$b)=($a>=$b) and ($a<$b)=($b>$a)) of comparison is implemented. Also I
dont think this would restrict real world applications much (if you have an
example, where a separate definition of < and >= could be useful, please
comment it).
Unlike the original idea, I dont think it should be possible to overwrite
identity operator (===), because it should always be possible to check if
two objects are really identical (also every case should be coverable by
equality). The same applies to the logic operators (!, ||, &&), I think they
should always work like intended (other languages like Python and C# handles
it that way too).
For the shorthand assignment operators like +=, -= the situation is a bit
more complicated: On the one hand the user has learned that $a+=1 is just an
abbreviation of $=$a+1, so this logic should apply to overloaded operators
as well (in C# it is implemented like this). On the other hand it could be
useful to differentiate between the two cases, so you can mutate the object
itself (in the += case) instead of returning a new object instance (the
class cannot know it is assigned to its own reference, when $a + 1 is
called). Personally I dont think that this would be a big problem, so my
PoC-Code does not provide a possibility to override the short hand
operators.) For the increment/decrement operators ($a++) it is similar, it
would be nice if it would be possible to overload this operator but on the
other hand the use cases of this operator is really limited besides integer
incrementation and if you want to trigger something more complex, you should
call a method, to make clear of your intent.
On the topic in which order the operators should be executed: Besides the
normal priority (defined by PHP), my code checks if the element on the left
side is an object and tries to call the appropriate magic function on it. If
this is not possible the same is done for the right argument. This should
cover the most of the use cases, except some cases: Consider a expression
like $a / $b, where $a and $b has different classes (class A + class B). If
class B knows how to divide class A, but class A does not know about class
B, we encounter a problem when evaluating just from left to right (and check
if the magic method exists). A solution for that would be that object $a can
express that he does not know how to handle class B (e.g. by returning null,
or throwing a special exception) and PHP can call the handler on object $b.
I'm not sure how common this problem would be, so I dont have an idea how
useful this feature would be.
My proof-of-concept implementation can be found here:
https://github.com/jbtronics/php-src https://github.com/jbtronics/php-src
Here you can find some basic demo code using it:
https://gist.github.com/jbtronics/ee6431e52c161ddd006f8bb7e4f5bcd6
https://gist.github.com/jbtronics/ee6431e52c161ddd006f8bb7e4f5bcd6
I would be happy to hear some opinions for this concept, and the idea of
overloadable operators in PHP in general.
Thanks and Best regards,
Jan Böhmer
I think that the left operand is the "owner", the magic method handler,
while the right operand is the argument.
So for $object * 5, we will have:
// $object instance
public function __multiply($number): self {
return $this->multiply($number);
}
But for 5 * $object we will have an error. Call order should be respected
now once that will be impossible you have $objectA * $objectB without
defines a priority (the main handler).
--
Atenciosamente,
David Rodrigues
Em ter., 28 de jan. de 2020 às 20:14, jan.h.boehmer@gmx.de escreveu:
Hello everybody,
the last days I have experimented a bit with operator overloading in
userspace classes (redefing the meaning of arithmetic operations like +, -,
*, etc. for your own classes).This could be useful for different libraries which implements custom
arithmetic objects (like money values, tensors, etc.) or things like
Symfony
string component (concatenate) operator, because it improves readability
much:$x * ($a + $b) instead of $x->multiply($a->add($b))
4 years ago, there was a RFC about this topic (
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/operator-overloading
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/operator-overloading), which was discussed a bit
(
https://externals.io/message/89967 https://externals.io/message/89967),
but there was no real Outcome.I have tried to implement a proof of concept of the RFC, I encountered some
problems, when implementing the operator functions as (non-static) class
members and pass them only the “other” argument: What happens when we
encounter an expression like 2/$a and how can the class differ this from
$a/2. Also not every operation on every structure is e.g on commutative
(e.g. for matrices AB =/= BA). So I tried a C#-like approach, where the
operator implementations are static functions in the class, and both
arguments are passed. In my PHP implementation this would look something
like this:Class X {
public static function __add($lhs, $rhs) { //...
}
}
The class function can so decide what to do, based on both operands (so it
can decide if the developer wrote 2/$a or $a/2). Also that way an
implementor can not return $this by accident, which could lead to
unintended
side effect, if the result of the operation is somehow mutated.I have taken over the idea of defining a magic function for each operation
(like Python does), because I think that way it is the clearest way to see,
what operators a class implements (could be useful for static analysis).
The
downside to this approach is that this increases the number of magic
functions highly (my PoC-code defines 13 additional magic functions, and
the
unary operators are missing yet), so some people in the original discussion
suggest to define a single (magic) function, where the operator is passed,
and the user code decides, what to do. Advantageous is very extensible
(with
the right parser implementation, you could even define your own new
operators), with the cost that this method will become very complex for
data
structures which use multiple operators (large if-else or switch
constructions, which delegate the logic to the appropriate functions). An
other idea mentioned was to extract interfaces with common functionality
(like Arithmetically, Comparable, etc.) like done with the ArrayAccess or
Countable interfaces. The problem that I see here, is that this approach is
rather unflexible and it would be difficult to extract really universal
interfaces (e.g. vectors does not need a division (/) operation, but the
concatenation . could be really useful for implementing dot product). This
would lead to either that only parts of the interfaces are implemented (and
the other just throw exceptions) or that the interfaces contain only one or
two functions (so we would have many interfaces instead of magic functions
in the end).On the topic which operators should be overloadable: My PoC-implementation
has magic functions for the arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /, %, **),
string
concatenation (.), and bit operations (>>, <<, &, |, ^). Comparison and
equality checks are implement using a common __compare() function, which
acts like an overload of the spaceship operator. Based if -1, 0 or +1 is
returned by the comparison operators (<, >, <=, >=, ==) are evaluated. I
think this way we can enforce, that the assumed standard logic (e.g
!($a<$b)=($a>=$b) and ($a<$b)=($b>$a)) of comparison is implemented. Also I
don’t think this would restrict real world applications much (if you have
an
example, where a separate definition of < and >= could be useful, please
comment it).Unlike the original idea, I don’t think it should be possible to overwrite
identity operator (===), because it should always be possible to check if
two objects are really identical (also every case should be coverable by
equality). The same applies to the logic operators (!, ||, &&), I think
they
should always work like intended (other languages like Python and C#
handles
it that way too).For the shorthand assignment operators like +=, -= the situation is a bit
more complicated: On the one hand the user has learned that $a+=1 is just
an
abbreviation of $=$a+1, so this logic should apply to overloaded operators
as well (in C# it is implemented like this). On the other hand it could be
useful to differentiate between the two cases, so you can mutate the object
itself (in the += case) instead of returning a new object instance (the
class cannot know it is assigned to its own reference, when $a + 1 is
called). Personally I don’t think that this would be a big problem, so my
PoC-Code does not provide a possibility to override the short hand
operators.) For the increment/decrement operators ($a++) it is similar, it
would be nice if it would be possible to overload this operator but on the
other hand the use cases of this operator is really limited besides integer
incrementation and if you want to trigger something more complex, you
should
call a method, to make clear of your intent.On the topic in which order the operators should be executed: Besides the
normal priority (defined by PHP), my code checks if the element on the left
side is an object and tries to call the appropriate magic function on it.
If
this is not possible the same is done for the right argument. This should
cover the most of the use cases, except some cases: Consider a expression
like $a / $b, where $a and $b has different classes (class A + class B). If
class B knows how to divide class A, but class A does not know about class
B, we encounter a problem when evaluating just from left to right (and
check
if the magic method exists). A solution for that would be that object $a
can
express that he does not know how to handle class B (e.g. by returning
null,
or throwing a special exception) and PHP can call the handler on object $b.
I'm not sure how common this problem would be, so I don’t have an idea how
useful this feature would be.My proof-of-concept implementation can be found here:
https://github.com/jbtronics/php-src
https://github.com/jbtronics/php-srcHere you can find some basic demo code using it:
https://gist.github.com/jbtronics/ee6431e52c161ddd006f8bb7e4f5bcd6
https://gist.github.com/jbtronics/ee6431e52c161ddd006f8bb7e4f5bcd6I would be happy to hear some opinions for this concept, and the idea of
overloadable operators in PHP in general.Thanks and Best regards,
Jan Böhmer
Hello everybody,
the last days I have experimented a bit with operator overloading in
userspace classes (redefing the meaning of arithmetic operations like +, -,
*, etc. for your own classes).This could be useful for different libraries which implements custom
arithmetic objects (like money values, tensors, etc.) or things like Symfony
string component (concatenate) operator, because it improves readability
much:$x * ($a + $b) instead of $x->multiply($a->add($b))
4 years ago, there was a RFC about this topic (
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/operator-overloading
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/operator-overloading), which was discussed a bit (
https://externals.io/message/89967 https://externals.io/message/89967),
but there was no real Outcome.I have tried to implement a proof of concept of the RFC, I encountered some
problems, when implementing the operator functions as (non-static) class
members and pass them only the other argument: What happens when we
encounter an expression like 2/$a and how can the class differ this from
$a/2. Also not every operation on every structure is e.g on commutative
(e.g. for matrices AB =/= BA). So I tried a C#-like approach, where the
operator implementations are static functions in the class, and both
arguments are passed. In my PHP implementation this would look something
like this:Class X {
public static function __add($lhs, $rhs) {
//...
}
}
The class function can so decide what to do, based on both operands (so it
can decide if the developer wrote 2/$a or $a/2). Also that way an
implementor can not return $this by accident, which could lead to unintended
side effect, if the result of the operation is somehow mutated.I have taken over the idea of defining a magic function for each operation
(like Python does), because I think that way it is the clearest way to see,
what operators a class implements (could be useful for static analysis). The
downside to this approach is that this increases the number of magic
functions highly (my PoC-code defines 13 additional magic functions, and the
unary operators are missing yet), so some people in the original discussion
suggest to define a single (magic) function, where the operator is passed,
and the user code decides, what to do. Advantageous is very extensible (with
the right parser implementation, you could even define your own new
operators), with the cost that this method will become very complex for data
structures which use multiple operators (large if-else or switch
constructions, which delegate the logic to the appropriate functions). An
other idea mentioned was to extract interfaces with common functionality
(like Arithmetically, Comparable, etc.) like done with the ArrayAccess or
Countable interfaces. The problem that I see here, is that this approach is
rather unflexible and it would be difficult to extract really universal
interfaces (e.g. vectors does not need a division (/) operation, but the
concatenation . could be really useful for implementing dot product). This
would lead to either that only parts of the interfaces are implemented (and
the other just throw exceptions) or that the interfaces contain only one or
two functions (so we would have many interfaces instead of magic functions
in the end).On the topic which operators should be overloadable: My PoC-implementation
has magic functions for the arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /, %, **), string
concatenation (.), and bit operations (>>, <<, &, |, ^). Comparison and
equality checks are implement using a common __compare() function, which
acts like an overload of the spaceship operator. Based if -1, 0 or +1 is
returned by the comparison operators (<, >, <=, >=, ==) are evaluated. I
think this way we can enforce, that the assumed standard logic (e.g
!($a<$b)=($a>=$b) and ($a<$b)=($b>$a)) of comparison is implemented. Also I
dont think this would restrict real world applications much (if you have an
example, where a separate definition of < and >= could be useful, please
comment it).Unlike the original idea, I dont think it should be possible to overwrite
identity operator (===), because it should always be possible to check if
two objects are really identical (also every case should be coverable by
equality). The same applies to the logic operators (!, ||, &&), I think they
should always work like intended (other languages like Python and C# handles
it that way too).For the shorthand assignment operators like +=, -= the situation is a bit
more complicated: On the one hand the user has learned that $a+=1 is just an
abbreviation of $=$a+1, so this logic should apply to overloaded operators
as well (in C# it is implemented like this). On the other hand it could be
useful to differentiate between the two cases, so you can mutate the object
itself (in the += case) instead of returning a new object instance (the
class cannot know it is assigned to its own reference, when $a + 1 is
called). Personally I dont think that this would be a big problem, so my
PoC-Code does not provide a possibility to override the short hand
operators.) For the increment/decrement operators ($a++) it is similar, it
would be nice if it would be possible to overload this operator but on the
other hand the use cases of this operator is really limited besides integer
incrementation and if you want to trigger something more complex, you should
call a method, to make clear of your intent.On the topic in which order the operators should be executed: Besides the
normal priority (defined by PHP), my code checks if the element on the left
side is an object and tries to call the appropriate magic function on it. If
this is not possible the same is done for the right argument. This should
cover the most of the use cases, except some cases: Consider a expression
like $a / $b, where $a and $b has different classes (class A + class B). If
class B knows how to divide class A, but class A does not know about class
B, we encounter a problem when evaluating just from left to right (and check
if the magic method exists). A solution for that would be that object $a can
express that he does not know how to handle class B (e.g. by returning null,
or throwing a special exception) and PHP can call the handler on object $b.
I'm not sure how common this problem would be, so I dont have an idea how
useful this feature would be.My proof-of-concept implementation can be found here:
https://github.com/jbtronics/php-src https://github.com/jbtronics/php-srcHere you can find some basic demo code using it:
https://gist.github.com/jbtronics/ee6431e52c161ddd006f8bb7e4f5bcd6
https://gist.github.com/jbtronics/ee6431e52c161ddd006f8bb7e4f5bcd6I would be happy to hear some opinions for this concept, and the idea of
overloadable operators in PHP in general.
On the subject of mutation, it seems awkward to me that $a + 1
would alter the value of $a or that 2/$b
should alter $b. Rather, I would expect a new value to be returned as a result of this operation.
If you take mutation off the table, then things become easier, IMO. We only need two magic methods:
- __toInteger(): int
- __toFloat(): float
Then, in any mathematical context, PHP could call the appropriate method and use the number returned in the calculation.
So, we could have something like this:
class MyNumber
{
public function __toInteger(): int
{
return (int) $this->number;
}
}
$x = new MyNumber(1);
$y = $x + 1;
And the value of $y would be 2.
Of course, there’s the question of what we do if a class defines both __toInteger() and __toFloat(), so perhaps a __toNumber() is more appropriate, though that leads us into discussions what the return type of this method should be and whether a number
scalar type is needed, but I think I’m getting ahead of the discussion here.
TL;DR: mutating an object in the context of a mathematical operation (unless I’m explicitly calling a method on the object with the expectation of mutating it) could result in confusing and unexpected results for programmers.
Cheers,
Ben
If you take mutation off the table, then things become easier, IMO. We
only need two magic methods:
- __toInteger(): int
- __toFloat(): float
Then, in any mathematical context, PHP could call the appropriate
method and use the number returned in the calculation.
I don't think this is enough to make operator overloading useful, even without mutation.
For example, the result of TimeInterval(1, 'ms') + TimeInterval(3, 'days') requires more information that we'd get out of __toInteger or __toFloat, but could still be a useful operation to perform, and ought to return a new TimeInterval (not an int). There are many of these tagged-number types where overloading would be helpful.
- mjec
Hello everybody,
the last days I have experimented a bit with operator overloading in
userspace classes (redefing the meaning of arithmetic operations like +, -,
*, etc. for your own classes).This could be useful for different libraries which implements custom
arithmetic objects (like money values, tensors, etc.) or things like
Symfony
string component (concatenate) operator, because it improves readability
much:$x * ($a + $b) instead of $x->multiply($a->add($b))
4 years ago, there was a RFC about this topic (
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/operator-overloading
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/operator-overloading), which was discussed a bit
(
https://externals.io/message/89967 https://externals.io/message/89967),
but there was no real Outcome.I have tried to implement a proof of concept of the RFC, I encountered some
problems, when implementing the operator functions as (non-static) class
members and pass them only the “other” argument: What happens when we
encounter an expression like 2/$a and how can the class differ this from
$a/2. Also not every operation on every structure is e.g on commutative
(e.g. for matrices AB =/= BA). So I tried a C#-like approach, where the
operator implementations are static functions in the class, and both
arguments are passed. In my PHP implementation this would look something
like this:Class X {
public static function __add($lhs, $rhs) { //...
}
}
The class function can so decide what to do, based on both operands (so it
can decide if the developer wrote 2/$a or $a/2). Also that way an
implementor can not return $this by accident, which could lead to
unintended
side effect, if the result of the operation is somehow mutated.
Using static methods sounds reasonable to me.
I have taken over the idea of defining a magic function for each operation
(like Python does), because I think that way it is the clearest way to see,
what operators a class implements (could be useful for static analysis).
The
downside to this approach is that this increases the number of magic
functions highly (my PoC-code defines 13 additional magic functions, and
the
unary operators are missing yet), so some people in the original discussion
suggest to define a single (magic) function, where the operator is passed,
and the user code decides, what to do. Advantageous is very extensible
(with
the right parser implementation, you could even define your own new
operators), with the cost that this method will become very complex for
data
structures which use multiple operators (large if-else or switch
constructions, which delegate the logic to the appropriate functions). An
other idea mentioned was to extract interfaces with common functionality
(like Arithmetically, Comparable, etc.) like done with the ArrayAccess or
Countable interfaces. The problem that I see here, is that this approach is
rather unflexible and it would be difficult to extract really universal
interfaces (e.g. vectors does not need a division (/) operation, but the
concatenation . could be really useful for implementing dot product). This
would lead to either that only parts of the interfaces are implemented (and
the other just throw exceptions) or that the interfaces contain only one or
two functions (so we would have many interfaces instead of magic functions
in the end).
Yes, i don't think it makes sense to group these operations in interfaces,
the use-cases are just too diverse. It's possible to define one interface
per operator (e.g. what Rust does), though I don't think this is going to
be particularly useful in PHP. I would not want to see functions accepting
int|float|(Add&Mul) show up, because someone is trying to be overly generic
in their interfaces ;)
As to whether it should be a single method or multiple, I would go for
multiple methods, as that makes it more clear which operators are
overloaded from an API perspective.
On the topic which operators should be overloadable: My PoC-implementation
has magic functions for the arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /, %, **),
string
concatenation (.), and bit operations (>>, <<, &, |, ^). Comparison and
equality checks are implement using a common __compare() function, which
acts like an overload of the spaceship operator. Based if -1, 0 or +1 is
returned by the comparison operators (<, >, <=, >=, ==) are evaluated. I
think this way we can enforce, that the assumed standard logic (e.g
!($a<$b)=($a>=$b) and ($a<$b)=($b>$a)) of comparison is implemented. Also I
don’t think this would restrict real world applications much (if you have
an
example, where a separate definition of < and >= could be useful, please
comment it).
I would recommend not handling overloading of comparisons in the same
proposal. Comparison is more widely useful than other overloading and has a
more complex design space (especially when it comes to accommodating
objects that can only be compared for equality/inequality for example).
Comparison may also benefit more from having an interface than the other
operators.
Unlike the original idea, I don’t think it should be possible to overwrite
identity operator (===), because it should always be possible to check if
two objects are really identical (also every case should be coverable by
equality). The same applies to the logic operators (!, ||, &&), I think
they
should always work like intended (other languages like Python and C#
handles
it that way too).
I agree that === should not be overloadable. || and && are
short-circuiting, so overloading them in any meaningful way would be pretty
hard anyway (we'd have to implicitly wrap the RHS into a closure or ...
something?)
For the shorthand assignment operators like +=, -= the situation is a bit
more complicated: On the one hand the user has learned that $a+=1 is just
an
abbreviation of $=$a+1, so this logic should apply to overloaded operators
as well (in C# it is implemented like this). On the other hand it could be
useful to differentiate between the two cases, so you can mutate the object
itself (in the += case) instead of returning a new object instance (the
class cannot know it is assigned to its own reference, when $a + 1 is
called). Personally I don’t think that this would be a big problem, so my
PoC-Code does not provide a possibility to override the short hand
operators.) For the increment/decrement operators ($a++) it is similar, it
would be nice if it would be possible to overload this operator but on the
other hand the use cases of this operator is really limited besides integer
incrementation and if you want to trigger something more complex, you
should
call a method, to make clear of your intent.
At least to start with, I don't think we should offer separate overloading
of $a += 1 and treat it as $a = $a +1, as the existing operator overloading
implementation does. Operators currently only work on values that use
by-value passing semantics, so if you write something like
$b = $a = 1;
$a += 1;
then $a will be 2, but $b will be 1. Using the $a = $a + 1 expansion for
operator overloading ensures that this is also the case for objects.
Of course there are performance concerns here, and it could in some cases
be significantly more efficient to perform an in-place modification. It is
possible to allow that while still keeping the above semantics by only
allowing an in-place modification if $a has no over users (something that
we can check in the VM). But I don't think this should be part of an
initial proposal.
On the topic in which order the operators should be executed: Besides the
normal priority (defined by PHP), my code checks if the element on the left
side is an object and tries to call the appropriate magic function on it.
If
this is not possible the same is done for the right argument. This should
cover the most of the use cases, except some cases: Consider a expression
like $a / $b, where $a and $b has different classes (class A + class B). If
class B knows how to divide class A, but class A does not know about class
B, we encounter a problem when evaluating just from left to right (and
check
if the magic method exists). A solution for that would be that object $a
can
express that he does not know how to handle class B (e.g. by returning
null,
or throwing a special exception) and PHP can call the handler on object $b.
I'm not sure how common this problem would be, so I don’t have an idea how
useful this feature would be.
That sounds reasonable to me.
My proof-of-concept implementation can be found here:
https://github.com/jbtronics/php-src
https://github.com/jbtronics/php-src
Unfortunately, this implementation goes in the wrong direction: PHP already
has full internal support for operator overloading through the do_operation
object handler. Operator overloading should be exposed to userland through
that handler as well.
Here you can find some basic demo code using it:
https://gist.github.com/jbtronics/ee6431e52c161ddd006f8bb7e4f5bcd6
https://gist.github.com/jbtronics/ee6431e52c161ddd006f8bb7e4f5bcd6I would be happy to hear some opinions for this concept, and the idea of
overloadable operators in PHP in general.
Thanks for working on this :) I think overloaded operators are a reasonable
addition to the language at this point. I think the main concern people
tend to have in this area is that operator overloading is going to be
abused (see for example << in C++). There are many very good use-cases for
operator overloading though (as mentioned, vector/matrix calculations,
complex, rationals, money, ...) Some of those are not common in PHP, but
maybe the lack of operator overloading is part of the problem there ;)
Regards,
Nikita
Would there be an RFC to push this feature(with the right handler, POC)
into PHP?
Or something would stop it from happening?
Hello everybody,
the last days I have experimented a bit with operator overloading in
userspace classes (redefing the meaning of arithmetic operations like +,
-,
*, etc. for your own classes).This could be useful for different libraries which implements custom
arithmetic objects (like money values, tensors, etc.) or things like
Symfony
string component (concatenate) operator, because it improves readability
much:$x * ($a + $b) instead of $x->multiply($a->add($b))
4 years ago, there was a RFC about this topic (
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/operator-overloading
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/operator-overloading), which was discussed a
bit
(
https://externals.io/message/89967 https://externals.io/message/89967
),
but there was no real Outcome.I have tried to implement a proof of concept of the RFC, I encountered
some
problems, when implementing the operator functions as (non-static) class
members and pass them only the “other” argument: What happens when we
encounter an expression like 2/$a and how can the class differ this from
$a/2. Also not every operation on every structure is e.g on commutative
(e.g. for matrices AB =/= BA). So I tried a C#-like approach, where the
operator implementations are static functions in the class, and both
arguments are passed. In my PHP implementation this would look something
like this:Class X {
public static function __add($lhs, $rhs) { //...
}
}
The class function can so decide what to do, based on both operands (so
it
can decide if the developer wrote 2/$a or $a/2). Also that way an
implementor can not return $this by accident, which could lead to
unintended
side effect, if the result of the operation is somehow mutated.Using static methods sounds reasonable to me.
I have taken over the idea of defining a magic function for each operation
(like Python does), because I think that way it is the clearest way to
see,
what operators a class implements (could be useful for static analysis).
The
downside to this approach is that this increases the number of magic
functions highly (my PoC-code defines 13 additional magic functions, and
the
unary operators are missing yet), so some people in the original
discussion
suggest to define a single (magic) function, where the operator is
passed,
and the user code decides, what to do. Advantageous is very extensible
(with
the right parser implementation, you could even define your own new
operators), with the cost that this method will become very complex for
data
structures which use multiple operators (large if-else or switch
constructions, which delegate the logic to the appropriate functions). An
other idea mentioned was to extract interfaces with common functionality
(like Arithmetically, Comparable, etc.) like done with the ArrayAccess or
Countable interfaces. The problem that I see here, is that this approach
is
rather unflexible and it would be difficult to extract really universal
interfaces (e.g. vectors does not need a division (/) operation, but the
concatenation . could be really useful for implementing dot product).
This
would lead to either that only parts of the interfaces are implemented
(and
the other just throw exceptions) or that the interfaces contain only one
or
two functions (so we would have many interfaces instead of magic
functions
in the end).Yes, i don't think it makes sense to group these operations in interfaces,
the use-cases are just too diverse. It's possible to define one interface
per operator (e.g. what Rust does), though I don't think this is going to
be particularly useful in PHP. I would not want to see functions accepting
int|float|(Add&Mul) show up, because someone is trying to be overly generic
in their interfaces ;)As to whether it should be a single method or multiple, I would go for
multiple methods, as that makes it more clear which operators are
overloaded from an API perspective.On the topic which operators should be overloadable: My PoC-implementation
has magic functions for the arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /, %, **),
string
concatenation (.), and bit operations (>>, <<, &, |, ^). Comparison and
equality checks are implement using a common __compare() function, which
acts like an overload of the spaceship operator. Based if -1, 0 or +1 is
returned by the comparison operators (<, >, <=, >=, ==) are evaluated. I
think this way we can enforce, that the assumed standard logic (e.g
!($a<$b)=($a>=$b) and ($a<$b)=($b>$a)) of comparison is implemented.
Also I
don’t think this would restrict real world applications much (if you have
an
example, where a separate definition of < and >= could be useful, please
comment it).I would recommend not handling overloading of comparisons in the same
proposal. Comparison is more widely useful than other overloading and has a
more complex design space (especially when it comes to accommodating
objects that can only be compared for equality/inequality for example).
Comparison may also benefit more from having an interface than the other
operators.Unlike the original idea, I don’t think it should be possible to
overwrite
identity operator (===), because it should always be possible to check if
two objects are really identical (also every case should be coverable by
equality). The same applies to the logic operators (!, ||, &&), I think
they
should always work like intended (other languages like Python and C#
handles
it that way too).I agree that === should not be overloadable. || and && are
short-circuiting, so overloading them in any meaningful way would be pretty
hard anyway (we'd have to implicitly wrap the RHS into a closure or ...
something?)For the shorthand assignment operators like +=, -= the situation is a bit
more complicated: On the one hand the user has learned that $a+=1 is just
an
abbreviation of $=$a+1, so this logic should apply to overloaded
operators
as well (in C# it is implemented like this). On the other hand it could
be
useful to differentiate between the two cases, so you can mutate the
object
itself (in the += case) instead of returning a new object instance (the
class cannot know it is assigned to its own reference, when $a + 1 is
called). Personally I don’t think that this would be a big problem, so my
PoC-Code does not provide a possibility to override the short hand
operators.) For the increment/decrement operators ($a++) it is similar,
it
would be nice if it would be possible to overload this operator but on
the
other hand the use cases of this operator is really limited besides
integer
incrementation and if you want to trigger something more complex, you
should
call a method, to make clear of your intent.At least to start with, I don't think we should offer separate overloading
of $a += 1 and treat it as $a = $a +1, as the existing operator overloading
implementation does. Operators currently only work on values that use
by-value passing semantics, so if you write something like$b = $a = 1;
$a += 1;then $a will be 2, but $b will be 1. Using the $a = $a + 1 expansion for
operator overloading ensures that this is also the case for objects.Of course there are performance concerns here, and it could in some cases
be significantly more efficient to perform an in-place modification. It is
possible to allow that while still keeping the above semantics by only
allowing an in-place modification if $a has no over users (something that
we can check in the VM). But I don't think this should be part of an
initial proposal.On the topic in which order the operators should be executed: Besides
the
normal priority (defined by PHP), my code checks if the element on the
left
side is an object and tries to call the appropriate magic function on it.
If
this is not possible the same is done for the right argument. This should
cover the most of the use cases, except some cases: Consider a expression
like $a / $b, where $a and $b has different classes (class A + class B).
If
class B knows how to divide class A, but class A does not know about
class
B, we encounter a problem when evaluating just from left to right (and
check
if the magic method exists). A solution for that would be that object $a
can
express that he does not know how to handle class B (e.g. by returning
null,
or throwing a special exception) and PHP can call the handler on object
$b.
I'm not sure how common this problem would be, so I don’t have an idea
how
useful this feature would be.That sounds reasonable to me.
My proof-of-concept implementation can be found here:
https://github.com/jbtronics/php-src
https://github.com/jbtronics/php-srcUnfortunately, this implementation goes in the wrong direction: PHP already
has full internal support for operator overloading through the do_operation
object handler. Operator overloading should be exposed to userland through
that handler as well.Here you can find some basic demo code using it:
https://gist.github.com/jbtronics/ee6431e52c161ddd006f8bb7e4f5bcd6
https://gist.github.com/jbtronics/ee6431e52c161ddd006f8bb7e4f5bcd6I would be happy to hear some opinions for this concept, and the idea of
overloadable operators in PHP in general.Thanks for working on this :) I think overloaded operators are a reasonable
addition to the language at this point. I think the main concern people
tend to have in this area is that operator overloading is going to be
abused (see for example << in C++). There are many very good use-cases for
operator overloading though (as mentioned, vector/matrix calculations,
complex, rationals, money, ...) Some of those are not common in PHP, but
maybe the lack of operator overloading is part of the problem there ;)Regards,
Nikita
I would recommend not handling overloading of comparisons in the same proposal. Comparison is more widely useful than other overloading and has a more complex design space (especially when it comes to accommodating objects that can only be compared for equality/inequality for example). Comparison may also benefit more from having an interface than the other operators.
I understand your point. There was already an RFC with an similar idea (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/comparable). I think the idea of having an comparable interface could be really useful for things like sorting algorithms (so these could sort any comparable object). The case that structures must not define an order (but can have equality) is a good point, maybe this could be solved with two interfaces Comparable (which defines the spaceship operator) and another one like Matchable or Equalable (which only defines an is_equal function). I would not split the comparison operators any further (the RFC mentioned above even suggested to overload the not equal operator) or we end up with situations, where $a!=$b is not the same as !($a==$b), which would make the code using it very difficult to understand.
It is maybe reasonable to split operator and comparison overloading into different RFCs so they can be discussed separately. But if PHP decides to offer operation overloading it should also offer a possibility to compare custom objects, or the operation overloading looses some of its intended convenience (like the situation in PHP 7.0 where you could define scalar type hints, but could not allow passing null easily).
Of course there are performance concerns here, and it could in some cases be significantly more efficient to perform an in-place modification. It is possible to allow that while still keeping the above semantics by only allowing an in-place modification if $a has no over users (something that we can check in the VM). But I don't think this should be part of an initial proposal.
I agree. If there is real need for this case, it could be implemented later.
Unfortunately, this implementation goes in the wrong direction: PHP already has full internal support for operator overloading through the do_operation object handler. Operator overloading should be exposed to userland through that handler as well.
I have seen this mechanism too late, and I have to understand a bit more how it works exactly, but I agree that this internal operator overloading mechanism should be used. I think it should be the goal that internal and userspace classes should appear the same to the user in points of the operator overloading, so an user can just call for example parent::__add() if he is extending a PHP class (e.g. Carbon does that for the datetime class). I will try to build an implementation using the do_operation handler, when I have time.
Thanks for working on this :) I think overloaded operators are a reasonable addition to the language at this point. I think the main concern people tend to have in this area is that operator overloading is going to be abused (see for example << in C++). There are many very good use-cases for operator overloading though (as mentioned, vector/matrix calculations, complex, rationals, money, ...) Some of those are not common in PHP, but maybe the lack of operator overloading is part of the problem there ;)
Ultimately we cannot really control how people will end up using the operation overloading, but in my opinion the benefits outweighs the drawbacks (also hopefully nobody would be insane enough to replace the print function with << ;) ).
With FFI-bindings it would be possible to build cool math/calculation libraries (similar to numpy in python), that can be accessed easily via PHP and does big calculations in native speed. I don’t think PHP will become an scientific used language like python, but sometimes some higher math function in PHP could be helpful. Also at least the handling of money values is quite common in web applications.
Unfortunately, this implementation goes in the wrong direction: PHP already has full internal support for operator overloading through the do_operation object handler. Operator overloading should be exposed to userland through that handler as well.
I have made another implementation (https://github.com/jbtronics/php-src/tree/operator_overloading) which provides an standard handler for do_operation, which calls the functions in user space.
I also removed the __compare magic function from my implementation, so this can be handled separately.
Another thing: What are your opinions on overload the bitwise not operator (~)? My implementations offers every other bitwise operator and this one would complete the set of bitwise operators. On the other hand unary operators does not have much use for objects and maybe encourage people using them as "shortcut" for calling things on the object, where an explicit method call would make the intend function more clear.
Regards,
Jan
Unfortunately, this implementation goes in the wrong direction: PHP already has full internal support for operator overloading through the do_operation object handler. Operator overloading should be exposed to userland through that handler as well.
I have made another implementation
(https://github.com/jbtronics/php-src/tree/operator_overloading) which
provides an standard handler for do_operation, which calls the
functions in user space.I also removed the __compare magic function from my implementation, so
this can be handled separately.
I cannot speak to the implementation details. From a design perspective, I am tentatively positive on operator overloading, with separate method for each operator, BUT, the big question for me is the rules around type compatibility.
Can you only compare 2 of the same type? What about subclasses? Can that differ if a subclass overrides that method? What happens to commutativity then? Can you compare based on an interface?
Examples:
class Money {
public function __add(Money $m) { ... }
}
class Dollar extends Money {
public function__add(Money $m) { ... }
}
class Euro extends Money {
}
$m = new Money(5);
$d = new Dollar(10);
$e = new Euro(15);
What should happen in each of these cases?
$m + $d;
$d + $m;
$m + $e;
$e + $m;
$d + $e;
Or similarly, is this allowed:
interface Money {
public function __add(Money $m);
}
There's a lot of very tricksy logic here to work out in terms of what makes sense to do before we could consider it. That logic may already have been figured out by another language (Python, C#, etc.) in which case I'm perfectly happy to steal their logic outright if it makes sense to do so. It's worth investigating before we go further to see what the traps are going to be.
Also, I want to reiterate: Any of these operations MUST be designed to return a new value, never modify in place. These operators only make sense on value objects, not service objects, and value objects should be immutable.
Which means that there is no __addEquals() method, just _add(), and we continue with that being isomorphic to $a = $a + $b;, the behavior of which is readily predictable.
I've actually been wondering lately if we shouldn't create an entirely separate data structure for value objects that helps enforce that difference of expectation. (Similar to shapes in Hack, or records or structs in various other languages.)
Another thing: What are your opinions on overload the bitwise not
operator (~)? My implementations offers every other bitwise operator
and this one would complete the set of bitwise operators. On the other
hand unary operators does not have much use for objects and maybe
encourage people using them as "shortcut" for calling things on the
object, where an explicit method call would make the intend function
more clear.
Frankly I'd avoid bitwise operators entirely for now. I'm not even sure how you'd use those...
--Larry Garfield
Also, I want to reiterate: Any of these operations MUST be designed to return a new value, never modify in place. These operators only make sense on value objects, not service objects, and value objects should be immutable.
I completely agree. This was the gist of my earlier comments.
Maybe we should resurrect discussion of the immutable classes and properties RFC: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/immutability
If we add the ability to specify immutability, then we can enforce in the engine that the left and right operands must be immutable.
For example:
public function __add(immutable $left, immutable $right);
Cheers,
Ben
Also, I want to reiterate: Any of these operations MUST be designed to
return a new value, never modify in place. These operators only make sense
on value objects, not service objects, and value objects should be
immutable.I completely agree. This was the gist of my earlier comments.
Maybe we should resurrect discussion of the immutable classes and
properties RFC: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/immutabilityIf we add the ability to specify immutability, then we can enforce in the
engine that the left and right operands must be immutable.For example:
public function __add(immutable $left, immutable $right);
Cheers,
Ben
Ideally, I don't think the items have to be immutable. Here is a silly
use-case:
public function __add($left,$right){
$left->operatedOn++;
$right->operatedOn++;
return $left->value + $right->value;
}
However, given the nature of operator overloading, I think the users should
EXPECT what they pass in will not be changed, unless they explicitly pass
by reference. This means we'd have to "change the rules" for operator
overloading magic methods, where objects are passed by value unless
explicitly passed by reference ( public function __add(&$left, &$right) ).
I think that is an even worse idea!
So, I think you really have two options. Change the rules so that even
objects are passed by value in this specific circumstance, and there is no
ability to pass by reference. I still don't like this, because it changes
the rules for only a specific scenario, but I think it's a better option
than the one above, as well as a better option than allowing mutable
objects 100% of the time - although, I'm not totally against spelling out
in the documentation "Don't modify the items passed in or you'll get
unexpected results!"
The other options is the immutability RFC. This doesn't change the rules -
it just adds a new rule. I don't see in that RFC, though, anything about
the immutable type hints. That's really the only thing that I think is
applicable to operator overloading.
--
Chase Peeler
chasepeeler@gmail.com
I like this whole operator overloading thing. I would probably use it in
brick/math https://github.com/brick/math and brick/money
https://github.com/brick/money to replace verbose ->plus()
,
->multipliedBy()
etc. calls.
Can you only compare 2 of the same type? What about subclasses? Can
that differ if a subclass overrides that method? What happens to
commutativity then? Can you compare based on an interface?
I think that this should behave exactly the same as if you replaced $a + $b
with $a->__add($b)
in your code. Nothing more, nothing less. The
result will depend on whether you type-hinted your magic method or not.
These operators only make sense on value objects, not service objects,
and value objects should be immutable.
Indeed, we would need to make it clear that the operation must not modify
the value of the current object, that should be effectively treated as
immutable.
Because it will probably be hard for the engine to enforce this, what about
using the same convention I use in my libraries, i.e. plus()
instead of
add()
, dividedBy()
instead of divide()
, etc.?
This would translate to magic methods such as:
__plus()
__minus()
__multipliedBy()
__dividedBy()
Benjamin
I cannot speak to the implementation details. From a design perspective, I am tentatively positive on operator overloading, with separate method for each operator, BUT, the big question for me is the rules around type compatibility.
I have avoided commenting on this thread to see where it would lead. I have been surprised so many here are embracing operator overloading.
My experience taught me operator overloading has been added to languages because "it seemed like a good idea at the time." But it is now considered to be harmful, by many:
- https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pitfalls-of-operator-overloading
- https://cafe.elharo.com/programming/operator-overloading-considered-harmful/
- https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sams-teach-yourself/0672324253/0672324253_ch21lev1sec4.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_overloading#Criticisms
- https://www.jarchitect.com/QACenter/index.php?qa=53&qa_1=overload-operators-special-circumstances-defined-literals
(Ruby's ability for developers to redefine the entire language is an especially chilling example of the concepts of operator overloading taken to the extreme: https://dev.to/jimsy/please-stop-using-ruby-4lf1)
That said, I will not protest further if others still really feel strongly about adding operator overloading after reviewing those criticisms.
Also, I want to reiterate: Any of these operations MUST be designed to return a new value, never modify in place. These operators only make sense on value objects, not service objects, and value objects should be immutable.
Which means that there is no __addEquals() method, just _add(), and we continue with that being isomorphic to $a = $a + $b;, the behavior of which is readily predictable.
Immutability is a great feature from functional programming. But I think it is orthogonal to operator overloading as it would be (relatively) easy to implement an __add() method but how would PHP enforce that __add() would not be able to mutate state?
Consider the following. How would __add() stop the mutating happening in $foo->bar->increment_ops()?
class Bar {
private $_op_count = 0;
function increment_ops() {
$this->_op_count++;
}
}
class Foo {
public $value;
public $bar;
function __construct( int $value ) {
$this->value = $value;
}
function __add( Foo $foo ): Foo {
$this->bar->increment_ops();
return new Foo( $this->value + $foo->value );
}
}
$foo = new Foo(10);
$foo->bar = new Bar();
$foo = $foo + new Foo(5);
echo $foo->value;
I am sure it would be possible to stop it, but I do not think it is trivial to architect nor implement. Given that I believe immutability would need to be implemented as an independent feature and not as an aspect of operator overloading.
If we still want operator overloading and we want to force operator overloading to require immutability, I believe that means we would need an immutability RFC to be approved (and implemented?) before operator overloading requiring immutability could be approved. Something like this:
class Bar {
private $_op_count = 0;
immutable function increment_ops() {
global $foo;
$foo = new Foo(); <====== Compile error!
$this->_op_count++; <====== Compile error!
}
}
I've actually been wondering lately if we shouldn't create an entirely separate data structure for value objects...
+1 for that.
-Mike
If we still want operator overloading and we want to force operator overloading to require immutability, I believe that means we would need an immutability RFC to be approved (and implemented?) before operator overloading requiring immutability could be approved. Something like this:
For reference, immutability has been proposed in the past, but I’m not sure where it landed. It looks like it fizzled out.
- https://wiki.php.net/rfc/immutability
- https://externals.io/message/94913
- https://externals.io/message/96919
- https://externals.io/message/97355
- https://externals.io/message/101890
- https://externals.io/message/81426
I agree with you that I think we need to accept an immutability RFC before operator overloading (requiring immutability) can be approved.
I also believe operator overloading should require immutability.
Cheers,
Ben
I cannot speak to the implementation details. From a design perspective, I am tentatively positive on operator overloading, with separate method for each operator, BUT, the big question for me is the rules around type compatibility.
I have avoided commenting on this thread to see where it would lead.
I have been surprised so many here are embracing operator overloading.My experience taught me operator overloading has been added to
languages because "it seemed like a good idea at the time." But it is
now considered to be harmful, by many:https://cafe.elharo.com/programming/operator-overloading-considered-harmful/
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sams-teach-yourself/0672324253/0672324253_ch21lev1sec4.html
(Ruby's ability for developers to redefine the entire language is an
especially chilling example of the concepts of operator overloading
taken to the extreme: https://dev.to/jimsy/please-stop-using-ruby-4lf1)That said, I will not protest further if others still really feel
strongly about adding operator overloading after reviewing those
criticisms.
Those are valid points. (Hence my "tentatively.") Operator overloading is one of those features that when used well can be really really nice, but is really easy to use badly (in which case it's really really not nice).
In all honesty, I'd probably be more excited about bringing back comparison overloading (__compare() and __equals()) than overriding arithmetic. Unless we could get some kind of bind operator, but that's probably asking for trouble. :-)
Also, I want to reiterate: Any of these operations MUST be designed to return a new value, never modify in place. These operators only make sense on value objects, not service objects, and value objects should be immutable.
Which means that there is no __addEquals() method, just _add(), and we continue with that being isomorphic to $a = $a + $b;, the behavior of which is readily predictable.
Immutability is a great feature from functional programming. But I
think it is orthogonal to operator overloading as it would be
(relatively) easy to implement an __add() method but how would PHP
enforce that __add() would not be able to mutate state?
Currently it cannot. That's another point of concern. We could at best document it and put "please please don't modify the object" in the docs, but that would probably work just as well as you think it would...
All of this is pointing in the "we need a language construct for value objects" direction, which I believe would be highly useful but I don't know how we'd do it nicely. (Mainly, how to handle what PSR-7 does with withX() type methods, which are clunky but the best we can do without some really funky new syntax.)
--Larry Garfield
Unfortunately, this implementation goes in the wrong direction: PHP
already has full internal support for operator overloading through the
do_operation object handler. Operator overloading should be exposed to
userland through that handler as well.I have made another implementation (
https://github.com/jbtronics/php-src/tree/operator_overloading) which
provides an standard handler for do_operation, which calls the functions in
user space.
Looks much better! If you submit a pull request, I can leave some more
detailed comments.
I also removed the __compare magic function from my implementation, so
this can be handled separately.Another thing: What are your opinions on overload the bitwise not operator
(~)? My implementations offers every other bitwise operator and this one
would complete the set of bitwise operators. On the other hand unary
operators does not have much use for objects and maybe encourage people
using them as "shortcut" for calling things on the object, where an
explicit method call would make the intend function more clear.
Don't really see a reason not to support it. We do overload the bitwise not
operator for GMP objects, and it would be equally applicable to other
"integer" style objects.
If you would like to start an RFC on this topic, please sign up for a wiki
account (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/howto) and send me your username.
Nikita
Looks much better! If you submit a pull request, I can leave some more detailed comments.
Okay, I will submit a pull request with my changes.
If you would like to start an RFC on this topic, please sign up for a wiki account (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/howto) and send me your username.
My Wiki account name is jbtronics.
Thank you,
Jan Böhmer
Hi,
Nikita Popov wrote:
Yes, i don't think it makes sense to group these operations in interfaces,
the use-cases are just too diverse. It's possible to define one interface
per operator (e.g. what Rust does), though I don't think this is going to
be particularly useful in PHP. I would not want to see functions accepting
int|float|(Add&Mul) show up, because someone is trying to be overly generic
in their interfaces ;)
The use-cases being diverse can be an argument against being able to
overload individual operators — if you consider using, for example, + to
mean something other than addition to be an issue. I don't like what
happens in languages like C++ where you do a bitwise left-shift to
output to a stream or divide two strings to concatenate paths.
Haskell has a nice approach (probably some other languages have this
too) where it has typeclasses that contain related operators, which
means that e.g. if you want to overload +, your type needs to support
Num which also contains -, *, abs, the sign function, and conversion
from integers. The obvious translation to PHP would be to use interfaces
with related operations grouped. We could even support overloading some
of the maths functions in theory (whether we should, I don't know…) Of
course, some determined person will just implement * because it's cool
and throw exceptions in the other methods…
Also, Haskell also lets you just define arbitrary operators, which may
even look the same as the built-in ones if you really want to, so maybe
it's a bad comparison point :p
Andrea
the last days I have experimented a bit with operator overloading in
userspace classes (redefing the meaning of arithmetic operations like
Some historic context: I am probably the one who did operator
overloading in PHP first. Oldest trace is this post:
https://markmail.org/message/y7rq5vcd5ucsbcyb
Here you can find some basic demo code using it:
https://gist.github.com/jbtronics/ee6431e52c161ddd006f8bb7e4f5bcd6
https://gist.github.com/jbtronics/ee6431e52c161ddd006f8bb7e4f5bcd6
This example can be used to show a major problem for PHP doing this.
The first problem is that PHP historically had very few type
annotations making the code hard to predict, modern PHP has more of
that reducing this a bit, but the big problem remains: In PHP we can't
overload functions, thus operators have to be member functions and
therefore form a closed set.
In your example the vector3 can operate on vector3s.
$a = new Vector3(1, 2, 3);
$b = new Vector3(3, 2, 1);
$c = $a * $b;
Within Vector3 that is complete. But maths allows multiplication with
integers. So, yes, you can extend your __mul() with a check for the rhs
as you did with the is_numeric, but why would
$c = 2 * $a;
call the Vecotr3's operator function? I believe it would call integer's
operator. Which obviously doesn't exist.
But okay, let's do a hack for integer, to call the second arguments
operator if first argument is an integer.
Now I come and really like your vector3 library and create my Matrix
type. With my Matrix i want to still use your Vector3.
include 'your/vector3.php';
class Matrix {
public static function __mul($lhs, $rhs) { ... }
}
$vec = new Vector3(...);
$matrix = new Matrix(...);
$result = $vec * $matrix;
Which one is being called? - Vector's or Matrix's. How will your
vector know about my Matrix?
The way C++ solves this is by allowing non-member functions as
operators.
#include "vector3.h" // provides class Vector3
#include "matrix.h" // provides class Matrix, potentially
// from a different vendor
Matrix operator*(const Vector3 &lhs, const Matrix &rhs) {
// I can provide this myself if neither Vctor's nor
// Matrix's vendor do
return ...;
}
int main() {
Vector3 vec{...};
Matrix matrix{....};
// works
auto result = vec * matrix;
}
To make this really work C++ has another magic, aside from function
overloading, which is ADL - Argument depending lookup, which is the
black magic of C++: If The function to be called is not only looked for
in the current or global namespace, but also the namespace of the first
Argument. So this works:
namespace JohannesCoolLibrary {
class Vector;
void func(Vector v);
Vector operator*(Vector lhs, Vector rhs);
}
namespace SomeOtherCoolThing {
JohannesCoolLibrary::Vector v1{};
JohannesCoolLibrary::Vector v2{};
v1 * v2; // will find the operator in the namespace
// even though it's using the global name
func(v1); // will also call function from argument's namnespace
}
Without these features you can only create closed types, which
massively limit interoperability, which massively limits the use cases
for operator overloading.
With limited set of use cases, this is a rare feature, which is hard to
understand, or how many internals reads do you expect immediately know
the output of
function a($a, $b) {
return $a + $b;
}
var_dump(a([1], [2]));
johannes
Hi Johannes,
Thank you for your points! I think you point out some overlooked issues.
Johannes Schlüter wrote:
Which one is being called? - Vector's or Matrix's. How will your
vector know about my Matrix?The way C++ solves this is by allowing non-member functions as
operators.#include "vector3.h" // provides class Vector3 #include "matrix.h" // provides class Matrix, potentially // from a different vendor Matrix operator*(const Vector3 &lhs, const Matrix &rhs) { // I can provide this myself if neither Vctor's nor // Matrix's vendor do return ...; } int main() { Vector3 vec{...}; Matrix matrix{....}; // works auto result = vec * matrix; }
I wonder if it would be a good idea, if we do want operator overloading
in PHP, to implement a similar mechanism for this. Perhaps type-specific
overloads could be registered via some special function call or
declaration, something vaguely like:
class Vector {
public function __construct() {
php\register_overload($this, Matrix::class, '', function ($a, $b) {
/ multiplication implementation here */
});
}
}
The engine could then do type-matching for you, and would implement
commutativity for you if the operator is commutative, so $someVector * $someMatrix
would call the above function, but so would $someMatrix * $someVector
. (Note: to support matrix multiplication, I guess
commutativity must be overridable. Also, I have forgotten whether
multiplying a matrix and a vector is commutative or not :p)
I think this approach would be less messy than having to implement full
type matching on both sides of a type pair, for a number of reasons:
- Instead of Vector having to have an implementation of __mul which
checks for Matrix, and Matrix having to have an implementation of __mul
which checks for Vector, just one of these types can call
register_overload with a single implementation (because the operation is
commutative). - Whether two types can be used with a particular operator is clear:
either there is such a pair registered, or there is not, and PHP can
give appropriate error messages. It is unlikely there will be an issue
where one side has __mul but it just throws an exception or somethig.
Also, in a case like$a * $b
, $a can implement support for $b without
$b having to support $a, while at the same time $b can implement support
for some unrelated other type, without$b * $a
not working (with the
current proposal, imagine $a's __mul handler supporting $b but not
vice-versa). - The engine can see conflicts (one class declares an overload involving
the other class, and vice-versa) and warn about them, rather than$a * $b
silently having completely different behaviour to$b * $a
.
This is not to say we necessarily should implement this, but it may be
worth thinking about…
Thanks,
Andrea