> I'm personally unconvinced of the value of this, and would probably propose > it was blocked by coding standards in my team if it was added, because its > meaning is so ambiguous.
That's perfectly reasonable. Do you also block use of casting to a string with (string) $foo as well? I ask because this proposal is simply on par with the idea behind string casting for objects. I don't expect that everyone would use custom array casting via __toArray(), but for those that would like to have that control and ease of use, it'd be valuable for them. > I actually see quite a lot of classes with normal methods called things > like "toArray", and my comment is always "to *what* array?" Most objects do > not have a single "natural"/"canonical" array representation I think the same could be said about "__toString()". But with that, some classes can be boiled down to a single representation, such as the Ramsey\Uuid <https://github.com/ramsey/uuid/> package. The same is with arrays. You can have a single entity such as person to where its array representation can be first name, last name, age, race, gender, email, etc..., or you can have a collection of items, to where in that representation as an array, you have control over what information is returned and what isn't. > As a thought experiment, imagine a similar method which allowed you to > overload (object)$foo. Although (array)$foo tells you slightly more than > that, I'm not convinced it tells you enough that you're not just hiding > meaning behind cute syntax. I'm confused by example, as there's no real need to overload casting to an object as a class is already an object. Whereas, a class is not already an array. It's not about "cute syntax", it's honestly about providing a simple clutter free helper for developers to take control over how their classes are transformed to array representations. > JsonSerializable actually suffers from similar problems, and is IMO useful > only because it's automatically recursive. I presume the proposed mechanism > would not be, i.e. return [$foo] would not be interpreted as return > [(array)$foo]. You bring up a good point. Could you for a moment pretend like you're behind this proposal and expand upon this question? If PHP were to have a __toArray() method, would you see it as being recursive? In your opinion, how should/would it react? I know not everyone will want or use this feature, but for those who would, it'd be a great addition IMO. So my goal of this initial thread was to see, "what if we had this feature, what would we want it to do?", and go from there. -- Steven Wade stevenwad...@gmail.com
