On Wed, Oct 18, 2023 at 2:05 PM Christian Schneider <cschn...@cschneid.com> wrote:
> Am 18.10.2023 um 18:42 schrieb Larry Garfield <la...@garfieldtech.com>: > > So the real question is: Would anyone who voted No on operator > overloading before vote Yes on it if it used ~=, ~>, ~+, etc. instead? > > I confess that I'm not a fan of operator overloading for a language like > PHP but introducing new operators on top of making them overloadable seems > a bad idea. Operators have the problem of being hard to look up and > prefixing them with ~ feels like the worst of both worlds. > > Regards, > - Chris > To add on to this, the proposal side-steps a potential BC break issue while introducing a collection of problems for libraries using PHP Tokens, Static Analysers, IDEs and more importantly the ability to grep your codebase looking for `==`. >From what I understood about the BC break concern, it's the fact that IF: - Existing code is comparing objects (relying on potentially non-deterministic behavior?) - PHP introduces operator overload - A library releases a new major version implementing operator overload - Existing code breaks Sounds to me that this is more between Library authors and Library users. Yes, PHP would be opening the door for potential BC breaks, but the stability of Composer packages and the adoption of Semantic Versioning throughout the industry makes this look like PHP is trying to protect grown, trained, mentally stable adults from running with knives. On Wed, Oct 18, 2023 at 1:43 PM Larry Garfield <la...@garfieldtech.com> wrote: > Honestly I'm still on team operator-override. *Most* major languages have > operator overloading, and it doesn't seem to cause a problem. (According > to my research, C++, Kotlin, Swift, Rust, C#, Haskell, Python, and Ruby all > have operator overloading. Go, TypeScript, PHP, and Javascript do not. > Java has comparison-only overloading so it's in the middle.) Most of the > "it causes so many problems" arguments are, from what I can tell, greatly > over-exaggerated. > > ---Larry Garfield > To argue against myself, I think Larry has a killer point in the language comparison. I think it's fair to say PHP is the weird one out for not having Operator Overload when even Python and Ruby (languages more similar to PHP than Kotlin or Rust) have them. Ultimately, if voters think it's best to overload `~=` instead of `==`, I think we bite the bullet and deal with the consequences. Even though I have every reason not to want `~=`, PHP deserves method overloading unless folks can show facts as to why nearly every other major programming language is wrong or why they can have it and we can't. -- Marco Deleu
