> On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 6:17 PM, Thomas Anderson <zeln...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > It'd be nice if, when doing $objA > $objB, that that'd invoke
> > $objA->__compareTo($objB) or something, much like Java's Comparable
> > interface.
> >
>
> Do you have examples of what this would be useful for? The two things that
> come to mind are DateTime (which can do this anyway as it's an internal
> class) and classes for bignums or something like that (which are probably
> also better implemented internally). So I'm not sure how much use there is
> for this.
>
> Nikita

I would like to see this feature in PHP! I often thought it would be very 
helpful. In days of PHP 5.2 I wrote a Date-Class similar to DateTime but with 
another API which should be the same as in C#. Comparing dates with 
``$date->compareTo($date2) > 0`` is always hard to read and error-prone.

Another example: You have one database entity and a collection and you want to 
check if it is in the collection.

$dbEntity = ...;
$dbCollection = ...;

foreach ($dbCollection as $tmpEntity) {
    if ($dbEntity->getId() == $tmpEntity->getId()) {
        // ...
    }
}

Instead you could write ``$dbEntity == $tmpEntity``. I think this is easier to 
read.

Of course you can say "just syntetic sugar", but better readability of code 
helps developers a lot!

Best regards
Christian

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