Combined assignment operator for short ternary

Am 19.08.2012 00:20, schrieb Andrew Faulds:

Sent from my iPhone

Hi,

Don't know, how complicated this is (and also someone (not me) must
implement it, because I can't :X), but to be in sync with the
operators the short ternary operator should be usable in conjunction
with the assignment like the other binary operators. Don't know, if
anybody understands me :D So here is an example

// instead of
$foo = $foo ?: 'default';
// Just
$foo ?:= 'default';
Why not just: $foo ?= 'default';
Just noting, I made a ML email earlier about this, except it would be
shorthand for isset($lval) ? $lval : $default. And this has been brought
up before several times.

The "except" is important: I don't want to change the behaviour in any way.

I have many of this "default assigments" and yes: This is just
syntactic sugar.

Regards,
Sebastian

Am 25.08.2012 01:00, schrieb Stas Malyshev:

Hi!

To point that out: I don't want to change the behaviour, which means

| $foo['xy'] ?:= 'bar';

would trigger a notice like

| $foo['xy'] = $foo['xy'] ?: 'bar';

Then I personally don't see much point in it. Saving a couple of
keystrokes IMHO is not really worth it.

Hi,

It's like with any other compound operator: A real reason isn't there.
But saying "It's not worth it" is something I can live with (even if I
don't know how much effort it would take ;)). I just asked myself: '?:'
is (a kind of?) binary operator and every other binary operator is
available as compound operator, so why not '?:', so I don't have to
repeat the variable?

Regards,
Sebastian

would this trigger a notice if $foo is not defined?
if yes, then it would be different from the current behavior of the
ternary operator.

Couldn't believe it, thus I tested it myself

snip

Don't know, what you are talking about, but the notice is the current
behaiour and therefore: No difference.

Sorry, I messed up that email. What I wanted to say:
If it accepts unset variable, then I could see usecases for it, but then it
would behave differently than the current ternary.
If it doesn't accept unset variable then it would in line with what we
have, but I don't see any usecase for it, because I would have to set it
before checking that it is falsely or not, in which case I would set it to
the default if not set already.

if no, then I would never use this.

I mean if I have to set the variable before the check, then I would put
the check into the assignment.

The main thought about it was

function foo ($bar = null) {
$bar = $bar ?: 'default';
}

If you wanted to enforce the 'default' value to be the default if no
argument passed, then you could use $bar = 'default' in the method
signature.
So I guess that you use that construct to handle when the argument is
passed, but it contains a falsely value ("0", array(), 0, etc.).
I agree that this can be useful in some cases.

I always use 'null' as default

For me, it isn't always null, sometimes it is boolean true/false, or an
empty array.

• If you want to omit a parameter, but want to set one after that, you
  don't need to look whats the default: It's 'null'

my IDE takes care of that problem for me.

• Ive often enough seen something like

function foo ($limit = 10) { /* code / }
// Somewhere else
function bar ($limit = 50) { / code / $foo($limit); / code */}
// Even somewhere else
bar();

same here.

--
Ferenc Kovács
@Tyr43l - http://tyrael.hu