Hi internals! I'm excited to share what I've been working on! I had an epiphany. I realized what we truly need to revolutionize PHP: a new operator.
Hear me out. We live in an imperfect world, and we often approximate data, but neither `==` nor `===` are ideal comparison operators to deal with these kinds of data. Introducing: the "approximately equal" (or "approx-equal") operator `~=` (to immitate the maths symbol ≃). This combines the power of type coercion with approximating equality. Who cares if things are actually equal, close enough amirite? First of all, if `$a == $b` holds, then `$a ~= $b` obviously. The true power lies where the data is not exactly the same, but "close enough"! Here are some examples: We all had situations where we wanted to compare two floating point numbers and it turns out that due to the non-exact representation, seemingly-equal numbers don't match! Gone are those days because the `~=` operator nicely rounds the numbers for you before comparing them. This also means that the "Fundamental Theorem of Engineering" now holds! i.e. 2.7 ~= 3 and 3.14 ~= 3. Of course also 2.7 ~= 3.14. But this is false obviously: 2 ~= 1. Ever had trouble with users mistyping something? Say no more! "This is a tpyo" ~= "This is a typo". It's typo-resistant! However, if the strings are too different, then they're not approx-equal. For example: "vanilla" ~= "strawberry" gives false. How does this work? * The strings are equal if their levenshtein ratio is <= 50%, so it's adaptive to the length. * If the ratio is > 50%, then the shortest string comes first in the comparison, such that if we ever get a `~<` operator, then "vanilla" ~< "strawberry". There is of course a PoC implementation available at: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/18214 You can see more examples on GitHub in the tests, here is a copy: ```php // Number compares var_dump(2 ~= 1); // false var_dump(1.4 ~= 1); // true var_dump(-1.4 ~= -1); // true var_dump(-1.5 ~= -1.8); // true var_dump(random_int(1, 1) ~= 1.1); // true // Array compares (just compares the lengths) var_dump([1, 2, 3] ~= [2, 3, 4]); // true var_dump([1, 2, 3] ~= [2, 3, 4, 5]); // false // String / string compares var_dump("This is a tpyo" ~= "This is a typo"); // true var_dump("something" ~= "different"); // false var_dump("Wtf bro" ~= "Wtf sis"); // true // String / different type compares var_dump(-1.5 ~= "-1.a"); // true var_dump(-1.5 ~= "-1.aaaaaaa"); // false var_dump(NULL ~= "blablabla"); // false ``` Note that this does not support all possible Opcache optimizations _yet_, nor does it support the JIT yet. However, there are no real blockers to add support for that. I look forward to hearing you! Have a nice first day of the month ;) Kind regards Niels
