Re: [RFC] [Discussion] Add clamp function

Hi, 2025-08-28 at 09:37, Tim Düsterhus <tim@bastelstu.be> wrote : > Hi > > Am 2025-08-28 08:35, schrieb Hans Krentel: > > This also highlights a minor but important clarification for the > > documentation. To make the behavior perfectly unambiguous, I suggest > > a small edit to explicitly state the bounds are inclusive. > > This is a good point and I agree that it should be spelled out > explicitly. However to me this also raises the question if the interval > boundaries should be configurable to switch between closed intervals and > (half-)open intervals. For many applications of continuous values a > right-open interval (excluding the upper boundary) is more useful, since > this makes it easy to generate non-overlapping ranges (e.g. to clamp to > a given day when passing DateTimeImmutable). This would also provide an > additional value-add over the min-max construction, where the boundaries > would need to be calculated manually, which is super complicated to do > in userland for floats. > > There's precedent in ext/random with the Randomizer::getFloat() method > that takes a Random\IntervalBoundary enum to decide on the the > interpretation of the boundary values. Translated to clamp() > this > could mean: > > $value = 1.0; > clamp($value, 0.0, 1.0, IntervalBoundary::ClosedOpen); // > 0.999999999999999888978 > > Best regards > Tim Düsterhus > Just my opinion but the function aims to provide an alternative to min(max()) that would be: - easier to read - faster to execute If having many different behaviors depending on an option and so a lot of if-else path complexity, then it will tend to defeat the second goal. I would add it if there is a strong interest, otherwise I'd rather stick to a minimalist implementation (like seen in most languages where clamp() is available.