Re: [RFC] Improve language coherence for the behaviour of offsets and containers
On Tue, Jul 9, 2024, at 7:52 PM, Levi Morrison wrote:
>> Moreover, I know the traffic on the list has been pretty high, but I do intend to have this
>> RFC up for voting for inclusion in PHP 8.4, and I'm not exactly sure how I am meant to
>> interpret the lack of responses.
>
> I am personally strongly in favor of the direction. As mentioned in
> the PR, my main concern is honestly quite a small one: I think
> Appendable::append ought to be renamed. Maybe Appendable and
> FetchAppendable too.
>
> The reason is that append is a common operation on a container type,
> which is likely to want to implement these interfaces. I easily
> identified a few such things with a quick GitHub search:
> 1.
> https://github.com/pmjones/php-styler/blob/5c7603f420e3a75a5750b3e54cc95dfdbef7d6e2/src/Line.php#L166
> 2.
> https://github.com/ParvulaCMS/parvula/blob/dcb1876bef70caa14d09e212838a35cb29e23411/core/Models/Config.php#L46
>
> Given that I anticipate these methods to largely be called by
> handlers, and not by names, I think an easy solution is to just name
> this offsetAppend to match the other offset operations. For example,
> I don't anticipate code doing:
>
> $container->append($item);
>
> I expect largely they will do:
>
> $container[] = $item;
>
> So it doesn't really matter if the name is append or
> offsetAppend
> for the main use-case, and thereby we avoid some road bumps on
> adoption. Any SPL containers with append, such as ArrayObject, can
> make it an alias of offsetAppend, I think?
>
> Anyway, this is a minor thing, and I will vote yes regardless of
> whether it (and maybe the *Appendable interface names) are changed.
> But I do think it would be prudent to change it. It would also match
> the offset* convention of the other interfaces.
Based on my research into collections with Derick, I agree that "append" is not a good
name to claim for this interface; it would make it incompatible with standard collection method
naming. offsetAppend() would neatly side-step that issue. +1 to what Levi said.
As to my limited response so far, it's mostly because I read through the proposal in detail a
few months ago when it was first informally put forward and liked it then, and it seems there
haven't been any serious changes since for me to comment on. I am very much in favor, though.
--Larry Garfield
Thread (15 messages)