Re: function call chaining

Stanislav Malyshev wrote: > Hi! > > I wrote a small patch that enables this kind of syntax in PHP: > > foo()(); > > What it means is that if foo() returns callable value (which probably > should be function name or closure) then it would be called. Parameters > and more than two sets of () work too. > Of course, this is mostly useful for doing closures, and that was > primary drive for implementing it - to make working with closures and > especially function returning closures easier. > What does not work currently is $foo->bar()() - since it is surprisingly > hard to tell parser it's not {$foo->bar}()() - which of course is not > what I want to do. > > The patch is here: http://random-bits-of.info/funcfunc.diff > > What do you think? If somebody has better idea btw - maybe make > something like {foo()}() - and make that work for any expression inside > {} - that might work too. So, what do you think? I don't mind the foo()() syntax, especially now that we have closures. But people are right, we have a longstanding feature request for $foo()[0] as well, so if we start down this path of adding chaining, we should do that one as well and see if any others make sense. I do think the syntax is a bit ugly, but I also think it is clear what it does and doesn't obscure/mislead the semantics of the call the way the (new foo)->bar() suggestion does. Not sure the {} expression syntax is needed. What sort of expressions do you see being useful here that would need the braces? Stuff like $a[$idx]() works today without needing any extra syntax. Are you thinking along the lines of: {strtolower($a[$idx])}() or something like that? That would make the "I hate linefeeds and semi-colons" crowd happy, I guess. -Rasmus