. period for Class Syntax references

Hi all.

I don't know if this has been implemented yet.

Is it possible to make the '.' period character act
place of the '->' character pair in class references,
without conflicting with the '.' concatenation character?

Possibly would have to implement the two styles of
referencing to allow for backward compatibility?

So, instead of writing: $this->my_var, one could then write
$this.my_var, which would be alot more in common with other
OOP languages.

Maybe it's me, but I find it alot easier to read and
pronounce '$this.my_var' == $this dot my_var,

than something like

'$this->my_var' == $this right-arrow my_var

Or, even some other single character that may be used
instead of the '->' pair. Any suggestions please?

Regards - Keith Roberts

http://www.karsites.net/

Thankyou for your quick replies Derick and Jason.

I've taken a look at the link below - but I don't want to
make any non-standard changes to the php engine - If it's
working, don't 'fix' it! I want my code to be portable as
well!

I agree with Andrei Zmievski's point of view though.
It's a shame it could not be implemented as a standard
feature of php zend engine.

Regards - Keith Roberts

To: "php@karsites.net" php@karsites.net
From: Jason Sweat jason.sweat@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] . period for Class Syntax references

On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 22:09:54 +0000 (GMT), php@karsites.net
php@karsites.net wrote:

Hi all.

I don't know if this has been implemented yet.

Is it possible to make the '.' period character act
place of the '->' character pair in class references,
without conflicting with the '.' concatenation character?

Possibly would have to implement the two styles of
referencing to allow for backward compatibility?

So, instead of writing: $this->my_var, one could then write
$this.my_var, which would be alot more in common with other
OOP languages.

Maybe it's me, but I find it alot easier to read and
pronounce '$this.my_var' == $this dot my_var,

than something like

'$this->my_var' == $this right-arrow my_var

Or, even some other single character that may be used
instead of the '->' pair. Any suggestions please?

Regards - Keith Roberts

Very dangerous to the long term maintainability of your code, but you
could look at:
http://www.gravitonic.com/software/php/ (near the bottom of the page)
which links to http://www.gravitonic.com/software/php/patches/ze2_concat_obj_op.diff.gz

Regards,
Jason
http://blog.casey-sweat.us/