Stas,
On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 5:01 AM, Stas Malyshev <smalys...@sugarcrm.com>wrote: > Hi! > > >> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/const_scalar_expressions > > I like the idea, but absence of constant support makes this thing much > less useful, as you can't do things like: > > public $angle = M_PI/2; > > I think this is one of the reasons this idea was never implemented - > because without constant support you're limited to doing things that are > quite obvious and trivial. > Yeah, having constants in those expressions would be great. If only constants in PHP were actually constant... But this win is really cheap (a trivial change to the parser), so I figured it was worth proposing separately. If we want to add the opcode stream later to do expressions for constant values, we can. This just gives us the quick win today of allowing relatively trivial, but important expressions. The biggest wins I see are in power-of-2 math: class Foo { const FLAG_1 = 1 << 0; const FLAG_2 = 1 << 1; const FLAG_3 = 1 << 2; const FLAG_4 = 1 << 3; const FLAG_5 = 1 << 4; const FLAG_6 = 1 << 5; const FLAG_7 = 1 << 6; } And in other complex formulas where having the self-declaration adds semantic meaning. Now, as far as if it's worth while making the change without constant support, that's for each of us to decide. I think it is, but if you don't, that's cool too. Thanks Anthony
