Re: RFC Operator Overloading in Userspace

Hi! > Hilarious to hear you cite that as the already existing inconsistency > between += and ++ with non-numeric strings came up only last week. > > $x = 'foo'; > $x++; // $x === 'fop' > $x += 1; // $x === 1 Exactly, because on strings ++ and += 1 are not the same operator. And, as you noted, it requires a pause to figure it out. But now imagine somebody overrides + and ++ to work on files, doing whatever sounded clever at the moment - how easy would it be to read that code? To maintain it? That's my concern. I do agree that is a question of judgement if we want this kind of magic. Right now I am leaning to the "no" side, especially given the RFC lacks the description of the actual use cases. I mean, the coolness factor is there, all the cool boys - C++, Python, Swift, Scala - do that, but I'd like to see what are the use cases specifically for PHP. > That's a significant difference in terms of semantics if there are > other references to $x lying around. Nevermind the cost of > newing/cloning/destroying objects when all you really wanna do is > mutate an existing one a bit. Right. But properly covering all this would require either a lot of boilerplate code or some very tricky engine coding. BTW, I don't think for GMP right now += modifies existing object. I guess it may be possible to implement it the other way (not sure). -- Stas Malyshev smalyshev@gmail.com