I am glad this topic arose! I was also planning to write on this topic to the internals mailing list, but have abandoned this idea, because I feel it might be inconvenient for the real active PHP developers on the list to receive too many emails from the people which don't actively participate in the development itself.
My interest in the pipe operator might seem a little non-standard - basically what I'd really want to see is a **nullable** pipe operator! There is a popular library github.com/schmittjoh/php-option, which has 250 MILLION installations. Basically what it provides is a class-wrapper of a value of lack thereof: it's either `Some<Type>` or `None`. I also maintain a similar library https://packagist.org/packages/someniatko/result-type which fixes some shortcomings of the original one related to the static analysis, but this is another story. Basically what the stats tell us is that such stuff is popular among the PHP community. In my eyes, it is actually semantically equivalent to the nullable PHP types: `?Type`. And some operations provided by the lib, are actually covered by PHP itself, which has multiple null-friendly operators: `$option->getOrElse($defaultVal)` --> `$nullable ?? $defaultVal` `$option->isEmpty()` --> `$nullable === null` `$option->getOrThrow(new \Exception('blah'))` --> `$nullable ?? throw new \Exception('blah')` I'd like to use the arguably "more idiomatic" native PHP nullables, rather than a foreign-feeling userspace construct, if they were more convenient. But there is a very important operation, `map()`, which is unfortunately not covered by the native PHP, which is `Option::map()`, and here is a real-world example: ``` return $repository->getById($idFromHttpRequest) ->map($serializer->serializeToJson(...)) // only executes when the Option is Some, not None ->map(fn (string $json) => new Response(status: 200, content: $json)) ->getOrElse(new Response(status: 404)); ``` I'd really like to write such code in a native way: ``` return $repository->getById($idFromHttpRequest) ?|> $serializer->serializeToJson($$) ?|> new Response(status: 200, content: $$) ?? new Response(status: 404); ``` Notice I use the old syntax here, using `$$` as a "piped" intermediate result variable, mostly because I'd like to use arbitrary PHP expressions, instead of piping functions only. I feel this is more natural for the PHP than the more functional-oriented way. I am okay with using functions too like this: ``` return $repository->getById($idFromHttpRequest) ?|> $serializer->serializeToJson(...) ?|> fn (string $json) => new Response(status: 200, content: $json) ?? new Response(status: 404); ``` but that feels less "clean", and also note the inconsistency with `?? new Response(status: 404)` part. Regards, Illia / someniatko
