Amateurish question to internals: Why can not we do more general cases? For example (expr)[3]; (expr)->foo->bar; (expr)()->baz[3]()->makeSomething()[4] = 16; etc.
Now we have (new some)->something; and doSomething()[12], but why only this cases? Big trouble in parser to do this? Can someone help me to find discussions about it, if they exist. With regards, Alexander Moskaliov ir...@irker.net 2011/11/20 Nikita Popov <nikita....@googlemail.com> > Hi internals! > > I want to discuss some details of the new dereferencing syntaxes which > were introduced in 5.4. > > 1. I already mentioned lack of support for dereferencing using the > alternative array syntax earlier > (http://markmail.org/thread/j6rs3bzgzhxmco7n) but there was no > conclusion on that topic. Now the (new A)[0] dereferencing syntax > landed without alternative syntax too. Does this mean that the general > consensus is to deprecate and remove the {} syntax altogether in the > future? > > 2. PHP always supported doing $arr[0]() and 5.4 added the reverse > func()[0]. The addition seems slightly inconsistent though, as the > combination of both does not work: func()[0]() will result in a syntax > error. Same applies to method array dereferencing. Is this > intentional? > > 3. The new expression method, property and array dereferencing > syntaxes were added in expr_without_variable. I am not sure whether > this was intentional or not. That way (new A)->b will not be a > variable (in the parser sense), whereas $a->b will. What is the impact > of this? One thing that will not work is doing (new A)->b = 'c'. I > know, this looks fairly stupid, but if you consider that A might > overload the __set operation it might actually make sense. (It won't > make much sense, but hey, (new A)[0] doesn't make much sense to me > either). Other areas that might be affected are return by reference, > pass by reference and iterate by reference (but I didn't test this). > > So, I know, those are all edge cases, so leaving them as is won't hurt > much. Still I think it's better to discuss them ;) > > Nikita > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > >
