Re: [RFC] Enumerations

On Mon, Dec 7, 2020, at 9:56 AM, Rowan Tommins wrote: > On 07/12/2020 15:26, Larry Garfield wrote: > > Assuming it's feasible to do, what do people feel about supporting that? IMO, > > cases(), from(), and values() need to be kept no matter what as they're more self documenting > > and can be passed around as callables. So the question is just whether we should also try to add > > casting as an alias to those operations. > > > From my experience answering questions about SimpleXML on Stack > Overflow, I can confirm that people find magic behaviour of (string) > hard to discover and understand, and it's not uncommon to see someone > write $foo->__toString() because they're more familiar with methods. > > That's even more true for other casts, e.g. (int)$foo and (float)$foo, > which can be supported by built-in classes but not userland ones, so are > even less discoverable. > > I can see the appeal of overloading cast syntax, but I would personally > be on the "just use explicit methods" side. > > Regards, > > -- > Rowan Tommins (né Collins) > [IMSoP] I spoke with Ilija and it turns out it would be really hard to do anyway, so casts are out. I rescind my request for feedback on that point. :-) --Larry Garfield