Re: Override keyword

Hi Michael, I think your proposition is related to annotations. It is a “service”, an _information_, so it clearly belongs to annotations, documentation or IDE domain, but it does not belong to the language. Are you agree with this? Best regards. On 22/03/12 21:27, Michael Morris wrote:

Without cluttering the RFC list up further (I fear I've done too much of that with the last two bombed suggestions), I'd just like to come out and ask if the addition of an override keyword on classes had ever been considered? I'd see it as more than a self documenting thing for BC reasons than anything else since, for BC we have to allow functions to override even if they don't have the keyword. But if a method is declared as an override, and none of the parent classes or imported traits have that method, then stating override would be a fatal error. Or, given... class A { public function foo() {} } class B extends A { public function foo ( $val ) {} } This is ok to avoid a backwards compat break, though if a move to require the override keyword was desired an E_STRICT might be raised. class C extends A { public override function foo ( $val ) {} } The only real advantage I will admit is self documentation by the code. We know C's foo is overriding something without opening A's class file. class D extends A { public override function bar ( $val ) {} } And this would raise E_FATAL. No existing code would be affected, and a programmer using this keyword would, I assume, want to be alerted that the override they are expecting doesn't exist. After all, if their override calls the parent method, they'd get an error anyway. I can write an RFC for this, but the last two I wrote got shouted down in such swift succession I think it would be better to get this vetted before writing the RFC.

-- Ivan Enderlin Developer of Hoa http://hoa.42/ or http://hoa-project.net/ PhD. student at DISC/Femto-ST (Vesontio) and INRIA (Cassis) http://lifc.univ-fcomte.fr/ and http://www.inria.fr/ Member of HTML and WebApps Working Group of W3C http://w3.org/