Hello everybody, It's the first time I write on the internals mailing-list, so let me introduce myself quickly. I'm a french and canadian CTO, working in Paris. I lead some PHP projects (mainly the Temma framework and FineFS data replication system). I begin to learn PHP's internal engine, backed by Pierrick Charron.
I would like to do an RFC proposal (see below for the associated patch). I was thinking about "what if PHP was a full-object language?". Like, for example, how will we write the simplest code, assuming that objects are handled using pointers since PHP 5. Take a look at this code: $a = 3; $b = $a; $a++; $b still contains the value 3. Now, if we imagine that even the integer data type is managed in an object, the same code will produce two pointers to the same object. Thus, $b will have the value 4, as $a. So, in this imaginary world, we would need to do a lot of object cloning. I wondered how this could be less painful, and I thought about the Pascal language's affectation operator (:=). Then we would be able to write something like that: $a = 3; $b := $a; $c = $a; $a++; $a equals 4, as $c. But $b equals 3. Back in the real world, we are not cloning objects very often. But, like many other syntactic sugars (as the short array syntax), I think it could be handy in some circumstances. There is a patch for this evolution, written by Pierrick. Full source code: https://github.com/adoy/php-src/tree/amaury-clone Code diff: https://github.com/adoy/php-src/commit/5107c0355c50381c7e67230cdc9f563eb3936a15 I'm looking forward to your advices. Cheers! Amaury
