Your PHP Wish list...

dougal85

What do you wish PHP could do? that it currently can't. Or what do you wish was easier?

Perhaps you what anonymous functions or a specific php extension. What would you like to see in PHP?

sheephat

Not so much wish as wondered what php would be like as a person, laid back or an annoying computer nerd?

There is not much i can think of that php doesnt already do for me. Hmm will have to think about this one.

benracer

Some how read your mind to create the perfect scrip, first time without having to debug 😃

dougal85

I'm fishing around for ideas for my MSc Dissertation.. (see this)

One thing I'd like to see is automated WSDL generation for SOAP web services.

Shrike

I think NuSoap does that.

I'd like to see some language level changes, for example array notation that can be chained along with methods

// Doesn't work
$object->returnsAnArray()[0];
//How about
$object->returnsAnArray()->index( 0 );

dougal85

Yeah, I'd love that too. Interestingly it works for values returned via the magic methods __get. I guess its just the () brackets following [] that creates something thing funny.

I've no idea how hard it is to change these things. I guess its pretty tricky or somebody would have done it by now.

Talking of the magic methods, I'd like to see magic methods for static calls. I think there is __callStatic but I've not tried it yet...

NogDog

dougal85 wrote:
...Perhaps you what anonymous functions...?

You mean like [man]create_function/man?

dougal85

Yeah, its true. You can do that. I'd meant to write more along the lines of lambdas or say javascript style

laserlight

I'd like to see some language level changes, for example array notation that can be chained along with methods

Nah, pointers ftw!

*($object->returnsAnArray() + $n);

Or maybe stipulate that adding an integer $n to an array returns the element at the index $n 😃

$object->returnsAnArray() + 0;

But yeah, I think that $object->returnsAnArray()[0] should arguably be allowed. "Arguably", since there is a case to be made for returning an ArrayIterator (or ArrayAccess) instead, and then writing:

$object->returnsAnArrayIterator()->offsetGet($n);

Actually, if SeekableIterator's seek() returned a seekable iterator instead of void, we could write:

$object->returnsASeekableIterator()->seek($n)->current();

Shrike

Thats a very good point LL, however it might be nice to hide that away so you don't need to explicity create and return the iterator.