RE: [PHP-DEV] Introducing "Array Of" RFC

> -----Original Message----- > From: Marco Pivetta [mailto:ocramius@gmail.com] > Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2014 9:25 PM > To: Kristopher > Cc: Philip Sturgeon; Robert Stoll; internals@lists.php.net > Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Introducing "Array Of" RFC > > On 15 January 2014 21:19, Kristopher <kristopherwilson@gmail.com> wrote: > > > I think this implementation (MyClass[]) should be consistent this when > > passing null. > > > > Even without the argument of consistency, the new syntax would be pretty > much useless if NULL was allowed, since every method would have > start > with a call to array_filter. > > Marco Pivetta > You could also think in a different way. NULL is basically a valid entry in an array. If you apply the restriction as implemented in the pull request then one cannot use the new syntax for arrays which allow NULL, that seems odd to me as well. Especially since class/interface-types are reference types and I regard NULL as something equal to a null-pointer. Furthermore, if one does not want to support NULL in an array currently, then one probably already uses an own collection implementation which already triggers and error, throws an exception respectively, when one tries to add NULL to the collection. It seems the pull request does not yet support multidimensional arrays (e.g. Foo[][]) but if we would stick to the restriction now then the consequence should be that this restriction also applies to multi-dimensional arrays. In my opinion, we would spoil valid use cases this way for RFC and for future ones (in the case multi-dimensional arrays will be introduced, other concepts could be affected as well). Thus I would suggest to remove this check and provide a further SPL data structure implementation instead which does not allow null as entry if this feature is really needed. Seems more appropriate to me than making a restriction in the language itself.