On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 8:34 PM, Rasmus Schultz <ras...@mindplay.dk> wrote:
> > What you're really trying to accomplish is something like the ".." > operator found in some other languages - this is known as the "cascade > operator" in Dart, for example: > > > http://news.dartlang.org/2012/02/method-cascades-in-dart-posted-by-gilad.html > > While I was writing about an operator to set object properties in-line here: http://news.php.net/php.internals/93662 , I considered it would be easy to add method calls to the same syntax: return Blah::create(5) { prop1 = 'hello', prop2 = a_func(), setThing(9), setOtherThing(1), }; which is in principle just an alternative syntax to as the cascade operator in Dart. I agree entirely that method chaining is just a verbose workaround for the lack of such a language feature. I've found a few problems with method chaining which this would resolve: 1. The verbosity of adding "return $this;" to all your mutator methods (Daniel Ciochiu's issue). 2. You can't return a value from a mutator method while also supporting method chaining. In theory mutator methods shouldn't need a return value (command-query separation) but in many cases they do, such as a setter which returns the previous value, a pop() method on a stack, or a delete($where) method returning the number of deleted records. 3. It is often unclear whether a method being chained is returning the same object it was called on, a copy of the object, or an instance of a different class altogether. You can work around this with careful method naming and documentation ("with.." for new instance, "set.." for same instance etc), but language-level support eliminates this issue entirely. You could really solve a whole range of problems with such a feature.
