> On 9 Dec 2014, at 23:07, Josh Watzman <jwatz...@fb.com> wrote:
>
> Hey internals! A useful feature that Hack picked up in the last few months
> are "nullsafe calls", a way of propagating failure forward in a series of
> chained method calls to the end of the whole computation, getting rid of a
> lot of the boilerplate in the middle. I think the feature would be a good one
> for PHP as well, so I'm submitting this RFC to add it -- you can see the RFC
> itself for a full discussion of the motivation for the feature, as well as
> the feature itself:
>
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/nullsafe_calls
Hi!
In a way, this would complement the ?? null coalescing operator we’re adding. :)
Two thoughts, though:
1) Wouldn’t it be useful to also have this for properties? If you’re going down
a long list of property accesses, $foo?->bar?->qux is probably nicer than if
($foo !== NULL && $foo->bar !== NULL) { $foo->bar->qux; … } - on the other
hand, the ?? operator partly covers this and even handles arrays, as you can do
$foo->bar[‘elePHPant']->qux[‘boop’] ?? NULL already. We also couldn’t add
something like ?-> for arrays, as the ?[] syntax is ambiguous (looks like
ternary with short array syntax).
2) It’d probably be better if you made a language specification patch before,
not after, the RFC is accepted. Having to specify the syntax and semantics
formally can make what the operator does clearer and help to spot issues. Plus,
going forward, the language specification should not be an afterthought.
Otherwise, though, I’m in favour of this change.
Thanks!
--
Andrea Faulds
http://ajf.me/
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