Re: Proposal: Type Casting User Classes

On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Chris London <me@chrislondon.co> wrote: > Hey everyone, > > I want to get a feel for something I would like to implement into PHP core. > I would like to be able to cast objects to my own class types. Similar to > already available PHP syntax: > > $foo = (string) $bar; > I've thought about this feature before in the context of PHP because I do think it would be useful, but I'm not sure if there's really a way to implement it that is any better than userland solutions. Your proposed __cast() call means that every object needs to know about every object which breaks down when multiple projects are involved. (Sure, it solves some cases nicely.) And I wouldn't be a fan of implicit conversions like: function foo (Foo $foo) { } foo(new Bar()); Assuming Bar does not descend from Foo, I wouldn't want a cast to Foo to be implicitly performed even if Bar had an appropriate "cast" method. So ultimately, I don't really see how a PHP solution is any better than just using home made explicit casts: $bar = cast_foo_to_bar($foo); or $bar = $foo->castToBar(); So I think the idea has merit, but I don't know that there's a good way to implement it. -- Matthew Leverton