On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 3:06 AM Levi Morrison via internals < internals@lists.php.net> wrote:
> The current RFC text is not consistent with using `=` or `=>` for the > assignments. The assignment `=` is vastly more common, though, and I > don't understand why if we are using an array syntax we aren't using > `=>`. > > I intend to vote no. I agree that we need to do something in this > space, but this is not it. I don't want perfect to be the enemy of > good either, but I think this still needs more work. Maybe interested > parties (including me) can collaborate off-list somewhere? > This is going to be a "no" vote from me as well. I don't think it's really possible to "save" this proposal though, at least if it remains as syntax sugar to perform multiple property assignments to one object. The syntax has two use-cases: Object initialization and everything else. I don't think it's doing a good job at solving object initialization, for reasons that others (and in particular Larry) have already pointed out in detail. And I don't really see a use case for this kind of mass property assignment outside of object initialization. I don't have much of a problem with the limitation to public properties (I love public properties!), the problem why this is unsuitable for object initialization is more that it is in practice mutually exclusive with constructors. You can either have a class that defines a constructor, in which case you can't use COPA with it (as the constructor would be doing the initialization -- ignore the argument-less case here), or you have a class without a constructor, in which case you essentially must use COPA. There's also no migration pathway between these two modes, in that switching between them is a backwards compatibility break for library consumers. And if it turns out that an object needs non-trivial construction logic at a later time, you can not easily introduce it without breaking COPA style initialization. This problem is not really limited to this proposal, it's a general problem of retrofitting object initialization syntax to a language that traditionally did not have it, and it doesn't seem to be an easy problem to solve. Regards, Nikita
