RFC: Automatic Property Initialization

11 years ago by Gordon Oheim — view source

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Independent but related to

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/constructor-promotion

I wrote an RFC about porting Dart-like Automatic Property Initialization
to PHP. Nikic was so generous to provide an initial PoC for it (since I
don't do C):

I am proposing this for inclusion in 5.6.
There is no BC breaks afaik.

The RFC suggests to allow for $this->foo as Constructor arguments to
make the boilerplate code for property assignments in constructors
superfluous. This is the core feature subject to discussion.

I've spoken to about two dozen developers outside internals prior to
suggesting this RFC and the general response was positive and the core
feature unanimously deemed useful. Moreover, in the previous discussion
about constructor promotion there was some messages suggesting that the
now proposed syntactic approach is more preferred than using visibility
keywords.

The RFC also suggests some related syntactic sugar like Methodless
Constructors, an alternate and shorter syntax, as well as making this
available in the entire class scope. These are things I am not sure of
so I am hoping for comments on these. Should this RFC get into the
voting phase, we should by then have either promoted or eliminated these
options through discussion.

Thanks and Regards, Gordon

11 years ago by Sebastian Krebs — view source

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2013/9/27 Gordon Oheim gooh@php.net

Independent but related to

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/**constructor-promotion https://wiki.php.net/rfc/constructor-promotion

I wrote an RFC about porting Dart-like Automatic Property Initialization
to PHP. Nikic was so generous to provide an initial PoC for it (since I
don't do C):

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/**automatic_property_**initialization https://wiki.php.net/rfc/automatic_property_initialization

https://github.com/php/php-**src/pull/474 https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/474

I am proposing this for inclusion in 5.6.
There is no BC breaks afaik.

The RFC suggests to allow for $this->foo as Constructor arguments to make
the boilerplate code for property assignments in constructors superfluous.
This is the core feature subject to discussion.

I simply don't like it to have a concrete method without body. Either
abstract without body, or concrete with body. In this case it would mean
to have an empty body

public function __construct ($this->x) {}

but I think that wouldn't be too bad :)

I've spoken to about two dozen developers outside internals prior to
suggesting this RFC and the general response was positive and the core
feature unanimously deemed useful. Moreover, in the previous discussion
about constructor promotion there was some messages suggesting that the now
proposed syntactic approach is more preferred than using visibility
keywords.

The RFC also suggests some related syntactic sugar like Methodless
Constructors, an alternate and shorter syntax, as well as making this
available in the entire class scope. These are things I am not sure of so I
am hoping for comments on these. Should this RFC get into the voting phase,
we should by then have either promoted or eliminated these options through
discussion.

Thanks and Regards, Gordon

--

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github.com/KingCrunch

11 years ago by Tobias Schlitt — view source

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Hi,

big +1 from my side. Would love to see this functionality in 5.6.

Thanks for the proposal, Gordon.

Cheers,
Toby

--
Helping people to create high quality web apps http://qafoo.com
Tobias Schlitt http://schlitt.info GPG Key: 0xC462BC14

11 years ago by Andrea Faulds — view source

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I think this is a great proposal. Anything that reduces code verbosity,
increases programmer productivity, improves readability and doesn't
bloat PHP gets my support.

--
Andrea Faulds
http://ajf.me/

11 years ago by Sebastian Krebs — view source

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2013/9/27 Matthieu Napoli matthieu@mnapoli.fr

Le 27/09/2013 09:17, Gordon Oheim a écrit :

Independent but related to

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/**constructor-promotion https://wiki.php.net/rfc/constructor-promotion

I wrote an RFC about porting Dart-like Automatic Property Initialization
to PHP. Nikic was so generous to provide an initial PoC for it (since I
don't do C):

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/**automatic_property_**initialization https://wiki.php.net/rfc/automatic_property_initialization

https://github.com/php/php-**src/pull/474 https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/474

I really like the proposal.

I just wonder about how it could mix/conflict with the named parameters
proposal? Given what you said about Reflection ($this->foo is treated like
$foo), then I guess it's not a problem then.

However maybe the RFC should reflect that you can't use:

public function __construct($this->foo, $foo) { … }

Also, at first glance I didn't find the "methodless constructor" very
useful (since it's only saving "{}"), but actually the possibility to use
this feature in setters too looks very good, it would avoid a lot of
boilerplate code.

Actually I would prefer to get rid of getters/setters completely and
finally get real accessor methods like in
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/propertygetsetsyntax-v1.2
The ability to shorten the setters is interesting, but it makes them look
"asymetric" to their corresponding getter (which still requires a
body/code) and anyway: It just patches the symptom, that they are required
at all.

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github.com/KingCrunch