On 16.07.26 04:07, Larry Garfield wrote:
On Thu, Jul 9, 2026, at 11:45 PM, Caleb White wrote:
Hi internals,
I'd like to open discussion on my (first!) RFC for the pipe assignment
operator (|>=):
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/pipe_assignment_operator
It adds a compound assignment form of the pipe operator, so that
$x |>= callable is shorthand for $x = $x |> callable, with
support for chaining. Implementation with tests is at:
https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/22633
Looking forward to your feedback.
Thanks!
Caleb
Perhaps weirdly, I am not a huge fan of this RFC. I'm open to pipe-compound
operators (the other that's been suggested is a null-safe ?|>, which I'd
support), but I'm not sure of the use case for this one.
That may be because, from a functional programming point of view, piping a back
to itself makes little if any sense. Values should be immutable, so you would
be doing
$b = $a |> foo(...) |> bar(...) |> baz(...);
I cannot think of a case where I would want to put $a on the left side, too.
How realistic is this use case?
I don't think this RFC would cause any harm, I suppose, so I probably won't
vote against it. But at the moment I don't see a compelling reason to vote for
it. A concrete real-world use case would help make that case, because I cannot
come up with one myself.
--Larry Garfield
Hey Larry,
// before
public function makeSlug(string $value): string {
$value = $value |> mb_strtolower(...); // ...
$number = $this->getNextSlugNumber($value); // checks DB
if (0 < $number) { $value .= "-$number"; }
return $value;
}
// after
public function makeSlug(string $value): string {
$value |>= mb_strtolower(...) ; // ...
$number = $this->getNextSlugNumber($value); // checks DB
if (0 < $number) { $value .= "-$number"; }
return $value;
}
Currently we have to make assignment gymnastics even for use cases that
do not require an immutable second value. Would argue many people in PHP
do and will use pipes for readability, not because they suddenly write
PHP from a functional programming point of view. This is a good
proposal, IMO.
--
Cheers
Nick
