Re: [VOTE] User Defined Operator Overloads

On 03.01.22 17:12, Larry Garfield wrote:

Also, people keep talking about edge cases. In my experience, "are these two objects equal" (for some object-specific definition of equal) is very much *not* an edge case. I may have less use for overloading % as I don't use advanced math that much, but I compare things all the frickin' time and that would be incredibly useful day to day.

Maybe some of the resistance against this RFC is the (understandable) focus on mathematical (or mathematical-adjacent) operations, making it seem that the "real" use-cases are narrow, whereas comparing objects could make quite a bit of code more readable, like comparing addresses, prices, availability or location/position. Having regular methods for operators is possible, but when used a lot the readability does start to suffer. The difficulty in arguing for operator overloading might be that the use cases are specific to a codebase and mainly become apparent once it is available (currently you just work around it). I do think it is a reasonable tool to make some code vastly more readable, and I don't see "novices" using operators a lot - PHP has many simpler features to abuse that can make code absolutely terrible. The RFC is really well thought out and reasoned, by the way - great work Jordan!