> -----Original Message-----
> From: Marco Pivetta [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2014 9:25 PM
> To: Kristopher
> Cc: Philip Sturgeon; Robert Stoll; [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Introducing "Array Of" RFC
>
> On 15 January 2014 21:19, Kristopher <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > I think this implementation (MyClass[]) should be consistent this when
> > passing null.
> >
>
> Even without the argument of consistency, the new syntax would be pretty
> much useless if NULL was allowed, since every method would have start
> with a call to array_filter.
>
> Marco Pivetta
>
You could also think in a different way. NULL is basically a valid entry in an array. If you apply
the restriction as implemented in the pull request then one cannot use the new syntax for arrays
which allow NULL, that seems odd to me as well. Especially since class/interface-types are reference
types and I regard NULL as something equal to a null-pointer.
Furthermore, if one does not want to support NULL in an array currently, then one probably already
uses an own collection implementation which already triggers and error, throws an exception
respectively, when one tries to add NULL to the collection.
It seems the pull request does not yet support multidimensional arrays (e.g. Foo[][]) but if we
would stick to the restriction now then the consequence should be that this restriction also applies
to multi-dimensional arrays. In my opinion, we would spoil valid use cases this way for RFC and for
future ones (in the case multi-dimensional arrays will be introduced, other concepts could be
affected as well).
Thus I would suggest to remove this check and provide a further SPL data structure implementation
instead which does not allow null as entry if this feature is really needed. Seems more appropriate
to me than making a restriction in the language itself.