Re: RFC: Enum

On 6/3/2011 8:27 AM, Dennis Haarbrink wrote:

As soon as I have my requested write permission in the rfc namespace i will update it. -- Dennis Haarbrink 2011/6/3 Pierrick Charron<pierrick@webstart.fr>

Hi, The RFC was supposed to be a draft (i didn't really added it in the good section) and was written more to introduce the idea and make people think about it. Feel free to update it with any idea, concern you may have. Pierrick On 3 June 2011 03:26, Dennis Haarbrink<dhaarbrink@gmail.com> wrote:

One thing I would really like to see in 5.4 is enums. There is already an RFC for that: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/enum This was discussed in february this year, but no consensus was reached. IIRC, the most notable problems were: - What is the 'value' of enum constant: string or int, user defined scalar, defaults - Ability to make enums more 'class like', some people wanted to be able to add methods. Another thing which was discussed (and I think most people agreed on that), but is not in the RFC: type hinting in method signatures. I think we should keep this simple proposal simple, let it be an enum in all its simplicity. The toughest part would be to decide what would be the default value. Some proposed to use the name of the constant, which is imho best for debuggability (i like this one the best), or an auto incrementing int, saying that it is better performance wise and which is more analog with mysql's enum type. So, to sum up: - Do we really need enum level methods? - Need to reach consensus on default values (strings vs auto inc. ints) - RFC needs to be updated, explaining the type hinting of enums in method signatures Regards, Dennis Haarbrink

If I might raise the question, I am also really interested in how enums could respond across namespace. Personally, I am not entirely sure about the ability to add methods to enums. That sounds like a class, to me. However, the second example on the RFC of use-case, wherein the developer uses a class to contain constants, sounds to me like a namespacing issue. Would enums be objects that are within the scope of the namespace, like classes, or would they be global? I would personally favor they remain in the scope of the namespace. That removes the need to prefix them with any sort of pseudo-namespace (like a class, for example), and it prevents collisions, of course.

- M.