Hey,
I'm right now looking at getting a proper implementation of array/string offsets done for the PHP compiler.
Here's the problem, in PHP you can access indices of both string's an array's in the same way, meaning:
[Snip PHP treating strings as character arrays]
To have this available easily using Perl's types, get_pmc_keyed() would need to be implemented in the PerlString PMC. Currently (for the sake of nice looking mandelbrot demos), we just assume is a native string and do the offset from that string (which parrot/imc does support.)
Should PerlString support a get_pmc_keyed() method (according to Perl 5/6 semantics), or is this a point where its about time to start implementing our own PMCs?
This... could be a problem. Perl, using a perl string as an array, should treat it as a symbolic reference if that's enabled. And, strictly speaking, if PHP is handed a PerlInteger it ought to treat it the same way as a PerlString. Or not, but it'd be reasonable as they're really facets of the same base type.
I can see a number of solutions here, some of which involve compiler hackery. The thing that first springs to mind is to have the PHP compiler emit a check of some sort before use, and either do array access or substring access. That's got a certain appeal to it, as it means we don't have to do anything. :) (Well, not true--we have to provide sufficient easily queryable metadata to tell if a variable is more or less an array, or a string, but we ought to so that anyway)
If that's not a reasonable option, and I can see it not being so, that makes things somewhat more interesting. Definitely calls for at least one custom PMC for PHP, and potentially an automatic wrapping function to throw a PHPStringWrapper (or whatever) around anything stringlike that comes back from an 'external' function call. That requires a bit more work on parrot's part, though, and, while I'd like to do this at some point (for JVM and .NET native library wrapping) I hadn't intended to do it yet, for lack of time and need.
--
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
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