Re: Invokation on __toString() for object used as array key

On 24 Sep 2014, at 20:56, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com> wrote: >> There the assumption would be that this leads to an array $a with two >> elements, where in fact there is only one if __toString() is being >> called. The only thing "making sense" would be using using the objects >> identity (i.e. via spl_object_hash()) everything else leads to issues. > > This is a valid concern. For this, Java, for example, has separate > methods hashCode() and toString(). Python has __str__, __repr__ and > __hash__. Ruby has object.hash. So maybe we should have another magic, > something like __hash(), that would produce a value for key? Then > objects that implement __hash would be hashable and those that don't > won't be, while still having usable __toString. I’m not sure that’d make much sense. The object isn’t the key, the value the magic method returns is. It would be quite odd to do this: $someArray = [$my__hashImplementingObject => 1]; var_dump($someArray); And see something like this, because we’ve called a hash function: array(1) { ["ec10e5a66e281d105f302cacfb1aaca8"]=> int(0) } I don’t really see what advantage this has over the normal __toString. Furthermore, having a special method we use to cast here that’s used nowhere else seems weird. Now, if we were to add actual object key support, that I might like. But if we’re going to keep with just integers and strings, I’d much prefer to just support __toString here. I think users are smart enough to understand that PHP arrays only have string or int keys, so it casts to a string. -- Andrea Faulds http://ajf.me/