Thanks. I only wanted some quick input into whether it was worth pursing before I do something daft.. like build it :)
All I wanted to know was, if the technicalities could be worked out, and a performance boost was possible, would people still dislike it. I'd still like to see it added, but I admit it was a long shot. Thanks, Dominic On 6 Jun 2016 1:10 p.m., "Andrea Faulds" <a...@ajf.me> wrote: > Hi, > > Others have already raised good technical points (performance, how to > distinguish when we have dynamic/weak typing), but I'd like to offer > another argument against it, that is, that even if it were possible we > might not want overloading anyway. > > From my perspective, function and method overloading in languages like C++ > or C# is useful for mainly two reasons: allowing omitting unnecessary > arguments (or, allowing providing additional, more specific arguments), and > accepting multiple types for arguments. > > However, we already have solutions for both of these in PHP. PHP's > functions and methods can have optional parameters for which you do not > have to provide an argument, and because PHP is dynamically-typed, a > parameter can accept an argument of any type (and within the function body > discriminate between types) if it needs to. Also, PHP has fewer and more > generalised types than some other languages do, so where a C# method might > have overloaded versions taking a UInt8, UInt16, UInt32, SInt8, SInt16 and > so on, an equivalent PHP method might only take PHP's single universal > integer type. > > Of course, this doesn't perfectly cover all the use cases of overloading. > You can't, for example, directly express in PHP that a function takes one > argument or another, but not both. That said, however, I don't think this > is necessarily a big problem: you can write two functions with different > names. > > Having to write differently-named functions may well be a good thing, too, > speaking from having had to deal with APIs in languages where a "single" > method can have more than a dozen overloaded forms, each behaving > differently, yet they all look confusingly similar at the call-site. > > Anyway, thank you for asking! > > -- > Andrea Faulds > https://ajf.me/ > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > >
