what happened to that new isset() like language

Hello Edin,

on the other hand it is not doable....not without a major slowdown.
Thus the idea of ifsetor($var, <expression>).

Why the hell do we need to discuss this over and over again?
The only way is this version. Be it with some cryptic operator like
'?:' or some function name like 'ifsetor'. Either way our internals
and the use of compiler compiler tools do not allow other stuff.
And speaking of '?:' we turned that down because it does suggest
'$a ? $a : <expr>' which is different from the functionality we
actually want: 'isset($a) ? $a : <expr>'. And actually 'ifsetor'
was only turned down because someone very very hard tried to find a
way to turn it down and could only come up with saying its name is
bad. Which i obviously absolutley disagree since its name is
perfectly clear and does not lead to confusion. Becuase it suggests
something like "IF something isSET than take it OR use the other".

regards
marcus

Sunday, October 30, 2005, 1:18:53 AM, you wrote:

If we're going to add a new language construct I believe that it should
be readable and not some perl-like thingie. SQL has coalesce() functions
which returns returns first non-null argument of any number of
arguments. PHP version could return a first set argument:

$lang = coalesce($_COOKIE['lang'], $user_settings['lang'], 'en');

It shouldn't be too difficult to tell what this one does.

Edin

Sebastian wrote:

Wow, it'll be just like perl! this is so great.

Andi Gutmans wrote:

I don't think it's a matter of giving the engine a try. I think we first need
to make a decision what the best way to go is and then we can discuss
implementation if/what is possible. Once 5.0.0 is out I'm going to have more
time look into this.

What's the word on this?

Some of the names given were:
issetor
ifsetor
ifset
ifnull
coalesce

I'm actually kind of partial to:

$a = $foo || $bar;
$a = $foo || $bar || $xyz || $etc;

Or better yet (or maybe in addition too):

$a['foo'] ||= 'bar'; // if set do nothing, otherwise assign 'bar'

-james

--

--

---

buddhahead@gmail.com

Best regards,
Marcus

However, in terms of precedents, there are the combined assignment
operators such as &=, +=, .=, and so on. They would suggest that

$a ||= $b;

should be equivalent to

$a = $a || $b;

So I don't think ||= in the suggested usage is intuitive. And adding
strange automagical meanings to $a = $a || $b || $c; (and so forth)
shouldn't even be discussed by sane people ;)

Regardless of what can be said about changing the behavior of '||', the
same isn't true for '||=', as it has no precedence in PHP.

Evaluating an idea based on it's syntactic similarities to other
languages is complete and utter nonsense. It has nothing to with being
like language Xyz. It has to do with familiarity to language constructs.
One already understands the idea of 'this || that'. It's certainly

I'll throw the water on this one:

<?php
$c = 0;
$a = 1;
var_dump($c || $a);
?>

Changing true into false consitutes a rather severe BC break :).

How about ||| and |||= ?

How about ~ and ~= ? Shorter to type.

I know that in logic it can mean NOT, but I think nearly all PHP
programmers would know that ! serves that purpose in PHP.

--
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General Manager
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Sara Golemon wrote:

Evaluating an idea based on it's syntactic similarities to other
languages is complete and utter nonsense. It has nothing to with being
like language Xyz. It has to do with familiarity to language constructs.
One already understands the idea of 'this || that'. It's certainly

I'll throw the water on this one:

<?php
$c = 0;
$a = 1;
var_dump($c || $a);
?>

Changing true into false consitutes a rather severe BC break :).

How about ||| and |||= ?

I don't think the meaning of this operator is obvious. Right now, the
only operators whose meaning are not immediately obvious (in my eyes) are:

@ - error suppression
& - make reference in some cases, bitwise and in others
^ - bitwise xor but what are you gonna do :)

For an operation as complicated as "use the first variable that exists"
I would be most comfortable with:

$d = first-existing: $a, $b, $c;

This way, no conflict with functions (parse error in previous php
versions), and it is extremely clear. The parser would look for

T_FIRSTEXISTING ':' existing_varlist

in the expression section, and of course defining existing_varlist as:

existing_varlist:
variable
| existing_varlist ',' variable
;

Greg

How about ||| and |||= ?

 How about a good ol' beating with a large trout? :)

 --Jani