Req #75022 [NEW]: control over object interactions

From: chris at kruining dot eu Operating system: All PHP version: Next Minor Version Package: PHP Language Specification Bug Type: Feature/Change Request Bug description:control over object interactions Description: ------------ I know that this subject is somewhat controversial in the community, nevertheless I want to request this as an language feature; The ability to gain control over object interactions. In this case I mean both casting and operator interactions. I have no clue or suggestion how this would work syntax-wise. One example would be to copy the c++ style of operator overloading, which is in my honest opinion not an elegant solution. the other one would be called cast-overloading I guess. In my case I have a Collection class, which is just a glorified array with a couple of options to chain methods, with the ArrayAccess and IteratorAggregate I can interact with it as if it ware an array if I wish to do so, however whenever I want to pass the collection to a function/method who takes an array as parameter I have to call the ToArray method I had to implement, which all it does is return the array it wraps. I would love to have control over how my object is cast to scalar types, in this case object to array, but I can think of many cases where I want to 'cast' to an integer or float. I am very curious to what you(the community) think of this proposal. Because on a more abstract level what I propose is to gain control over implicit code instead of making my code explicit. Test script: --------------- - Expected result: ---------------- $collection = Collection::From([ 'these', 'are', 'some', 'items' ]); $collection[] = ','; $collection[] = 'are'; $collection[] = 'they'; $collection[] = 'not?'; $collection =(array)$collection; Would be [ 'these', 'are', 'some', 'items', ',', 'are', 'they', 'not?' ] Actual result: -------------- Actually is [ 'items' => [ 'these', 'are', 'some', 'items', ',', 'are', 'they', 'not?', ] ] -- Edit bug report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=75022&edit=1 -- Try a snapshot (PHP 5.4): https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=trysnapshot54 Try a snapshot (PHP 5.5): https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=trysnapshot55 Try a snapshot (trunk): https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=trysnapshottrunk Fixed in SVN: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=fixed Fixed in release: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=alreadyfixed Need backtrace: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=needtrace Need Reproduce Script: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=needscript Try newer version: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=oldversion Not developer issue: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=support Expected behavior: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=notwrong Not enough info: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=notenoughinfo Submitted twice: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=submittedtwice register_globals: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=globals PHP 4 support discontinued: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=php4 Daylight Savings: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=dst IIS Stability: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=isapi Install GNU Sed: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=gnused Floating point limitations: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=float No Zend Extensions: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=nozend MySQL Configuration Error: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=75022&r=mysqlcfg