[cdmckay]

This simply isn't possible in a way that would be convenient.

For example, how would I make a string abstraction? Create a class? Ok, so we have:

$str = new String("foo") $str->replace(...)

over

$str = "foo" str_replace($str, ...)

This is fine, if we ignore the fact it's much slower.

Where it really gets annoying is PHP's lack of operator overloading. That means to concatenate I'd need to do

$str->concat($str2)->concat(new String(" "))->concat($str3)

instead of

$str . $str2 . " " . $str3

There's things you can do to make the API a little bit more convenient (i.e. allow it accept PHP strings, etc.), but ultimately it becomes a huge pain, especially if you want to start interoperating with other libraries that are using a different abstraction or, more likely, using the regular PHP types and functions.

[imaginenore]

Javascript doesn't have operator overloading, but it doesn't stop you from doing

    "foo".replace('oo', 'ood') + " tasty"

I don't see why PHP can't treat strings specially as well.

[chriswarbo]

> Where it really gets annoying is PHP's lack of operator overloading. That means to concatenate I'd need to do

> $str->concat($str2)->concat(new String(" "))->concat($str3)

> instead of

> $str . $str2 . " " . $str3

Erm, no you wouldn't. What's wrong with either of these?

    String::implode($str1, $str2, new String(" "), $str3);
    String::sprintf("%s%s %s", $str1, $str2, $str3);

Of course, if you want to add operator overloading, you might as well overload '"' as well, so you can use "foo" instead of new String("foo").

Personally, I'd prefer operators to have function equivalents, so your example could be written:

    array_reduce([$str1, $str2, " ", $str3], '.', "");

I've raised this at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=66368

[Mikushi]

Please no. This is awful verbose syntax. Use Java if that's what you want.

This is not PHP, this will never be PHP. Some people need to remember the purpose for which PHP was started and what it still is great at: making websites.

You guys are stuck in high brow academic debate on the semantic of a language that was born before many of us started coding, and that helped the web become what it is today. And that has come a long way.

I'm not saying to stop improving the language, but as someone who has used PHP for 15 years, all the issues I see come up constantly in threads like this are non issues, never encountered them in any web situation, you have to seek these "bugs"/annoyance, or be seriously inexperienced with PHP, or as I've been saying for years any time I do conferences: you are using PHP wrong.

So please, keep your verbose syntax in other languages that "need" it, while there are improvement to be made on PHP, this is not an area that needs one.

Also, looking at your bug submission/request, I share krakjoe sentiment: what the F are you trying to achieve? Seriously, I am curious. To me it screams wrongly used PHP.

[chriswarbo]

> To me it screams wrongly used PHP.

Of course it's wrongly used, since it doesn't work (hence my request to make it work).

The issue is not whether we should write such code now (we obviously shouldn't, since we'll hit all kinds of language problems); it's whether we'd like to write such code in the future (in which case we need to fix those problems now). Personally, I would like to avoid redefining built-in capabilities over and over.

As for what I'm trying to achieve, the same as everyone else: clean, understandable, maintainable code.

Here's something I ran across this week. I'm instantiating a class $class (read from a config file) and need to inject dependencies ($dep_classes, read from a config file) into the constructor. How to do it?

    $deps = [];
    foreach ($dep_classes as $dep_class) {
      $deps[] = new $dep_class;
    }
    $instance = new $class(...$deps);

It works, but turning $dep_classes into $deps is clearly a use-case for array_map. We shouldn't reinvent the wheel:

    $deps = array_map(function($dep_class) { return new $dep_class; }, $dep_classes);
    $instance = new $class(...$deps);

Again, it works, but that anonymous function is pretty horrible; we might have been better off with the loop!

However, it's clear that, again, we're reinventing the wheel. array_map passes the class names to its callback, so why are we passing them to "new" ourselves?

    $deps = array_map('new', $dep_classes);
    $instance = new $class(...$deps);

This gives an error, since "new" is an operator. Does this scream of "wrongly used PHP", or is it a problem with the language that would be nice to fix? I'd say the latter, since at the moment we're forced to do one of two things:

- Use a foreach loop to duplicate the functionality of array_map. - Define a new function which behaves exactly like "new".

Perhaps 15 years with PHP has given you a "gut feeling" to avoid programming styles which will inevitably run into problems; I've certainly got such a feeling after 4 years. While avoiding those problems is useful to get a job done today, it would be even better if we didn't have to worry about them tomorrow.

There's no point adding features like array_map, anonymous functions, etc. to the language if we all have to learn to avoid them to avoid parser errors.

[pippy]

Many PHP data types (such as mysqli etc) have been made into objects, and I agree 100% that it's silly to do this with strings. Ease of string manipulation is a PHP strong point.

You'll be giving PHP devs a loaded gun by allowing them to register primitive types (as proposed by nikic). Most frameworks would add to them, but I know some people would change default behaviour to 'fix' issues such as db character encoding issues which would make debugging hell.

[maaaats]

Well, it doesn't have to be slower. The generated bytecode can be the same. And there could still be syntactic sugar left to allow for easy concating.