Hey Nikita,
> On 2 Feb 2015, at 16:32, Nikita Popov <nikita....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 4:27 PM, Andrea Faulds <a...@ajf.me> wrote:
> Hey Nikita,
>
> > On 2 Feb 2015, at 13:49, Nikita Popov <nikita....@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I've voted -1 because I think this should be a function and not an
> > operator. compare($a, $b) is more obvious than $a <=> $b and it's not like
> > writing comparison functions is such a super common use case that it needs
> > the extra brevity of an operator. A function can furthermore be used as a
> > callback, while an operator requires a wrapping closure.
>
> There’s no actual use for the bare comparison operation as a callback,
> though: usort($foo, ‘compare’); would just be a slow version of sort($foo);
>
> It may not be applicable to a direct sort() call, but it's useful for higher
> level APIs. With a function you can create APIs of the form `function
> foo(..., $comparator = 'compare') { ... }`, which will default to the
> "standard" comparison function without having to specially handle it all over
> the place.
Yes, that’s true.
I’d previously suggested adding a function to get a closure of an operator. But
actually, perhaps we should just follow PHP’s traditional string typing of
callables, and make ‘+’, ‘-‘, ‘<‘, ‘<=>’ etc. be valid callables?
Thus:
function doesThing($a, $b, callable $callback = ‘+’) {
return $callback($a, $b);
}
doesThing(1, 2); // 3
Thoughts?
(I realise this is slightly OT.)
--
Andrea Faulds
http://ajf.me/
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