Reflection API RFC

http://www.gravitonic.com/software/php/reflection.txt

Comments and suggestions are appreciated.

What about doing it with some interfaces?

Why?

-Andrei http://www.gravitonic.com/

• Software never has bugs. It just develops random features. *

I have the first draft of PHP 5 reflection API ready. You can find it
at:

http://www.gravitonic.com/software/php/reflection.txt

Comments and suggestions are appreciated.

• ClassType::getMethods([int flags]);

I assume flags is a bitfield of private, public, protected, final
and so on, defaulting to all of them?

Something like that. I haven't finalized what kind of method searching
will be available. Perhaps one of the flags will be REGEXP with a
optional argument specifying the regexp to match method name against.

-Andrei http://www.gravitonic.com/

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth

• If you stored token start/end then you would be able to do getSource
  for function/method/class.. etc.. (which can do a load file/tokenizer
  and return implode('',array_range(starttoken,endtoken)

Keeping track of the tokens this way would require quite some code, I
think.

• it may also be better to store the token of the doc comment - On some
  of the pear classes the comment code is larger than the PHP code, and
  would be quite an overhead... - just make it throw an exception if you
  forgot to load the tokens for it..

Hmm, I see the point, but is that really a problem? If a lot of people
are worried about the overhead of storing doc comments, we could perhaps
store only the starting/ending line of the comment and let the other
tools extract them. But it means that the tools have to have access to
the original source file - not really possible with 3rd party software
distributed under an encoder, for example.

• there appears to be no arguments array for methods/functions

No really good way of doing it with the current architecture. I defer to
Andi/Zeev to see if it's possible to capture the declared parameters
somehow..

• not sure if extendsClass(), would be implemented by Implements?, and
  theres no getExtendsArray(), to return the tree of extends

What would extendsClass() do?

• constructors: -
  $classdetails = new ClassType('myclass');
  $classdetails = new ClassType($this);
  rather than
  $classdetails = ClassType::fromName('myclass')
  $classdetails = ClassType::fromInstance('myclass')

I'd rather avoid overloading. And in this case, these methods are
basically factories.

• I still think it would be nice to implement some of them as variables
  so that
  print_r($classdetails); would display some cute output...

We could always have toString() method for each one..

btw - It would also be nice to have unloadclass - so
a) the codedoc generators - could load and free classes.
b) php-gtk could reload modules rather than having to restart each time
to test code..

What do you mean by unloadclass?

-Andrei http://www.gravitonic.com/

"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."
-- Wolfgang Pauli

It would be cool if there was a way to get the (defined) set of
parameters for a function / method. I'm going to assume that, because
it's not included in your proposal, it's not currently possible given
the current model, though.

Right. The engine would need to be modified in order to keep track of
that.

-Andrei http://www.gravitonic.com/

"Everything should be made as simple
as possible, but not simpler."
-- Albert Einstein