Hi
Am 2025-05-19 12:48, schrieb Volker Dusch:
I was hoping for some additional opinions here before adding my own, but since this does not appear to happen, adding my personal opinion on this matter now:
*Some* property name being completely incompatible with “clone with” (no matter how the first parameter is going to be called) is a limitation that should not exist, it feels like a feature that is broken by design and I think I really would hate it if the documentation of this RFC would need a “Caution: It is not possible to reassign a property called '$object', due to a parameter name conflict”.
Adjusting the signature to `clone(object $object, array $withProperties)` would not have this problem and I don't consider the additional verbosity of an array literal to be a problem. Static analysis tools already understand array shapes and would need adjustments either way to understand the semantics.
From an implementation PoV a regular array parameter would also be simpler, since the implementation would be able to simply pass along the input array, whereas the “variadic” syntax needs special handling to combine positional parameters with named parameters into a single array that is then used in the cloning process.
Syntax-wise there might also be a middle-ground. Similarly to how this RFC turns clone() into a function, the array() syntax also looks like a function call and would naturally extend to named parameters. While mixing positional and named parameters would probably get complex, allowing purely named parameters would trivially be possible (without any function call overhead). It would also allow using the first-class-callable syntax with array(...), something I would liked to have in the past. A proof of concept PR is at:
https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/18613
Combining named-parameter array() syntax with clone taking a array as the second parameter would allow for the following, which might combine the best of both worlds?
clone($obj, array(foo: 1, bar: "baz", object: "this is not blocked"));
Best regards
Tim Düsterhus