Re: [VOTE] Interface Default Methods

On Tue, Jul 11, 2023, at 3:16 PM, Robert Landers wrote: > On Tue, Jul 11, 2023 at 4:36 PM Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com> wrote: >> You have to check your vendor folder for an interface, or trait, or abstract class. That >> doesn't change anything. >> >> As noted, now consider a Baz interface. For interface-and-trait, you add 2 more >> definitions. For interface-with-defaults, you add 1. For abstract classes, you need to add 4: >> BazBase, FooBazBase, BarBazBase, and FooBarBazBase. > > I guess I don't understand what the interface is solving if you're > creating an interface _and_ a trait, why not just create the trait? It > sounds like you're coupling your interface to a specific > implementation and trying to get multi-inheritance out of PHP. This > seems like a design issue, and this RFC seems like a back-way to > multiple inheritance. Why not just allow multiple inheritance? > >> And that's assuming you're even in control of the base classes; you may not even >> be able to create all those combinations without lots of copy-pasta. >> >> Abstract classes are basically vestigial since PHP 5.4, and have no use cases: > > As a user of abstract classes since the early days of C++, I disagree. > > I'd love to see a concrete example, but to me, this just seems like a > bandaid on an architectural smell. Real code I wrote a week ago (specifically, for a series of events in a domain model): https://gist.github.com/Crell/f5929e2ee44decd4e9353c41874f26c8 Two different interfaces, that I want to be able to check against, but their implementations are trivial. One of them is used in 2 classes, the other in 3. A base class simply wouldn't work, both because it's semantically incorrect (these events are not all "special cases of" some common definition, that's not the data model), and because then I couldn't have the class that uses only one of them. Traits, for now, are the best solution, and this is an approach that gets taken a lot. Interface default methods saves a file, and lets us merge the traits into the interfaces. That's basically it. And that's helpful. As for it being "back door multi-inheritance", well, Java, Kotlin, and Rust all do essentially that now. So we're hardly breaking new ground, design-wise. If anything, it's playing catch up on data modeling capabilities, an area where PHP is still sadly very much lacking. --Larry Garfield