Re: Generics proposal

No, this is useful in any OOP-language where there is such thing as type, and people need to validate types. I unerstand what you are saying about PHP being an easy language, but in opinion if you don't want to use that feature you can not use it, as you can not use typehinting in functions for example.

Hi Nikita, What you're asking for is useful in other languages, but it doesn't match the style of PHP which is to be a quick and easy type-less scripting language. What you're proposing is clearly more suited to something like Java or C#, but doesn't really belong here. I'd also hate to see this anywhere near PHP. Many thanks, Paul. On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 11:10 PM, Marco Pivetta <ocramius@gmail.com> wrote:

On 20 October 2012 23:09, Michael Stowe <mikegstowe@gmail.com> wrote:

I see what you're trying to do but not a big fan of how it's being implemented in the example given. - Mike Sent from my iPhone On Oct 20, 2012, at 4:02 PM, Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com>

wrote:

On 10/20/2012 01:59 PM, Nikita wrote:

Hello, list. I want to propose generics. For those, who don't know

what

it is, here's example: say we have a Comment class, that has a method getBody. Also we have Collection class, that implements Traversable.

Now,

if I want to validate all insertions into collection of comments, I

would

need to create CommentCollection class, extend it from Collection, and override all the methods that are dealing with adding new elements to collection. Moreover, I can't have any hints from my IDE about type of collection's elements, so if I'll have code like this:

foreach ($commentCollection as $comment) { $comment->getBody(); } There will be no way for IDE to know, of what type that object will

be.

But there's how I could solve my problem with generics: class Collection<T> implements Traversable { ... public function add(T $element){} } $collection = new Collection<Comment>(); $collection->add(new Comment()); $collection->add("that will be error"); Actually, that's, again, all about type hinting. If we went so far

with

scalar type hinting, then generics would also be a good addition.

So, what you think?

Personally I would hate to see this anywhere near PHP. -Rasmus -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php

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Well, the example just shows what I've already got used to when working with Java. I like it and it would be of great help to me (especially in reducing the amount of code to be tested), but there's a lot more around that, like multiple generic types (new Map<Comment, User>()) and how reflection would deal with it... Marco Pivetta http://twitter.com/Ocramius http://ocramius.github.com/