Re: RFC: short and inner classes

On 15.3.2025 00:21:32, Rowan Tommins [IMSoP] wrote:

On 05/03/2025 23:11, Rob Landers wrote:

I'd like to introduce my RFC for discussion: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/short-and-inner-classes

As a user, I find the concept of inner classes quite confusing. However, I was looking at some code earlier and thought an "inner enum" would be useful, to replace various "MODE_FOO" type class constants - but I see those are left to future scope. :( Yeah, that's quite disappointing. I expected this to simply apply to all types of "class" until I saw the explicit exclusion.

I'm aware they exist in a lot of other languages, though, so I thought I'd look around at how the proposed version compares. It seems there's quite a zoo out there... One common theme I do note is that all four of the pages I found are titled "nested classes" or "nested types"; in some cases, "inner class"/"inner type" has a specific meaning, which I don't think matches the RFC's proposal. C# - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/classes-and-structs/nested-types I think this is most similar to what you're proposing. Interestingly, the nested class defaults to being private, i.e. only usable within the parent class. The default visibility in c# is private, for everything. The RFC is consistent with the default visibility in PHP: public. c# is consistent with the default visibility for c#.

Classes, structs and interfaces can all be nested inside each other. Java - https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/javaOO/nested.html There are two types of nested class (plus some more related concepts which seem less relevant) - "Static nested classes" - static in the sense that they act like a static member of the surrounding class; appear to be *only* about namespacing and visibility of the class, with no special access to the surrounding scope - "Inner classes" - associated not just with a parent class, but a parent *instance*, so have to be created with the syntax "ParentClassName.new InnerClassName" or "this.new InnerClassName"; are not allowed to have static members inner (instance) classes in Java are quite a weird beast. I don't think it fits PHP paradigm nicely.

Bob