RE: [PHP-DEV] Re: PHP 6.0 Wishlist

From: Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 23:17:13 +0000
Subject: RE: [PHP-DEV] Re: PHP 6.0 Wishlist
References: 1 2  Groups: php.internals 
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Guys,

Anonymous functions are really a niche feature and tend to lead to pretty magical code. I really don't think that it's an important enough feature which would be usable to the mainstream PHP users.
We really need to get a grip on the new features and not overcomplicate the language. There will always be a thousand and 1 niche features we can borrow from other languages but the big advantage and reason for PHP's success is its simplicity.
I think that if you're one of those power users that requires this niche features then you can survive with create_function() or in cases of other features, with other ways of achieving the same goal...

Andi
P.S.- I learn ML at university which is almost 100% closures. Very ugly stuff... Unmaintainable and hard to parse in your brain.

At 08:47 AM 8/23/2005, Dmitry Stogov wrote:



-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Walter [mailto:michael.walter@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2005 10:18 AM
To: Stanislav Malyshev
Cc: Marcus Boerger; internals@lists.php.net
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: PHP 6.0 Wishlist


On 8/22/05, Stanislav Malyshev <stas@zend.com> wrote:

MB>>> * Anonymous functions. The real stuff, not just some

odd string

MB>>> passed to create_function().
MB>>
MB>>There were some others already asking for this, maybe

we should at

MB>>least give it a thought if it is doable at all, anybody?

Just out of curiosity, what's bad in create_function and how "real"
ones should be different?


"Real" anonymous functions (as in, closures) should be able
to capture variables from its lexical environment, e.g.:

  function adder($a) {return function($b) {return $a+$b;}}
  function index($i) {return function($a) {return $a[$i];}}

I'm sure you can think of useful examples.

I like this syntax and expected behavior.
The only problem is implementation.

Anonymous functions those don't capture variables from lexical scope can be
compiled once at file compile time, instead of evaluating in
create_function(). But I don't see how it can be done with variable
capturing.

Thanks. Dmitry.

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