AW: [PHP-DEV] Attributes support proposal

Hi, [...] > I am playing around with an extension to the Zend Engine 2 to > allow class properties and methods to be tagged with > attributes. These attributes would then be accessible through > the Reflection classes: The PHP development team is usually against these kinds of OOP syntax sugar additions, search Google / the archives for: * Having IException as an interface instead of needing to extend the builtin Exception class (php-internals) * Static initializers (pear-dev) * with() keyword (???) * Namespaces (php-internals, zendengine2) * Operator overloading (php-internals) * throws clause (zendengine2) * Passing NULL to typehints (php-internals) * finally (php-internals) * Return type hints (php-internals) * self should reflect runtime class (php-internals) * Automated getters/setters (php-internals) (this list is by no means complete) Having said that, how about implementing that in userland? class Storable { #[serializer:toString; persistent:true;] public $date; } Extend (or wrap) the reflection classes and add: MyClass::getAnnotations() MyMethod::getAnnotations() MyProperty::getAnnotations() In those, parse the sourcecode with ext/tokenizer and extract all comments beginning with the string "#[", push them into a hashmap and return it. It's not as slow as you might expect. Of course, it'll only work if you don't use "#[" in any other comments:) - Timm