Re: Mixed mode methods

On Mon, 2 Sep 2019 at 15:03, Christian Schneider <cschneid@cschneid.com> wrote: > > Please don't shoot this down just because you are not the target audience of such a > feature That is always good advice. When you draft the RFC, I strongly recommend coming up with a line of reasoning of why creating static versions of functions like this: class Foo { static function createFromXml($html) { $instance = new static(); $instance>loadXml(); return $instance; } function loadXml($html) { //... } } Are such a terrible burden, that keeping the mixed mode calling is a desirable thing. I say that as I think it would need a strong justification rather than just "it's something that could be done". In particular, there are tools like https://github.com/rectorphp/rector that I understand could be used to do this automatically, at least for userland code. Also(, without checking to see if it's feasible,) to me a less surprising approach would be to allow static and instance methods to be declared separately with the same method name. class Foo { static function loadXml() { echo "I am static method\n"; } function loadXml() { echo "I am instance method\n"; } } Foo::loadXml(); (new Foo())->loadXml(); // output is // I am static method // I am instance method Although that doesn't meet your goal of allowing seamless upgrades, it seems like a better approach to allowing that sort of thing in general. At least in the sense of, if I had to explain this capability to a junior programmer, explaining that the static method is used when called statically, and the instance method is used when called on an instance, would be easier to explain that '$this' might or not be there. cheers Dan Ack