Code References

Hi,

I figure I'll just throw this out into the wilderness, I want closures
and function pointers in PHP. In other words I want the ability to do:

^^^^
I meant code references of course.

-Sterling

"Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out,
but that is not the reason we are doing it."
- Richard Feynman

Anything that create_function() doesn't do?

Zeev

At 16:16 19/05/2003, Sterling Hughes wrote:

Hi,

I figure I'll just throw this out into the wilderness, I want closures
and function pointers in PHP. In other words I want the ability to do:

$var = function ($a, $b) {
return $a + $b;
};

And then $var can contain a code reference to the anonymous function.
Having code references is an infinitely useful feature in my experience,
and I know other people have some really cool uses of closures for
lightweight templating (with mod_perl.) [1]

I'd also like function pointers, which are optimized callbacks of some
sort, so you can go:

function my_compare($a, $b) {
if ($a > $b) return 1;
if ($a < $b) return -1;
return 0;
}

sort($ar, <my_compare>);

And compare doesn't need to be resolved at runtime, but rather can be a
compile time feature.

-Sterling

[1] I say code references on purpose. This doesn't need to mean full
fledged closures, which are probably overkill (although, they would be
nice too ;)

--
"That stuff's easy compared to installing Horde"
- Alan Knowles, In response to my applause for creating a LALR
parser for PHP.

Excuse my ignorance, but how does this differ from the features offered
by create_function? (Other than having nicer aesthetics.)

Hi,

I figure I'll just throw this out into the wilderness, I want closures
and function pointers in PHP. In other words I want the ability to do:

$var = function ($a, $b) {
return $a + $b;
};