Hi Olumide,
czw., 12 wrz 2019 o 17:07 Olumide Samson <oludons...@gmail.com> napisał(a):
> The RFC is a beautiful feature suggestion, but something is telling me as
> beautiful and straightforward the syntax is, what can the use case be?
>
> I really love Constructor or Object initialization to be implemented in
> PHP, but is there something I think you're missing in the RFC?
>
> Thanks for the RFC.
>
I'm open to suggestions.
PHP is known for borrowing features from other languages and this feature
is also known from other languages.
* Rust allows whole struct initialization in one expression, although these
are not classes but being able to instantiate, initialize
and return instance directly after it's being initialized reduces a lot of
boilerplate.
* C# uses an object initializer for the same purposes, one expression which
allows to instantiate, initialize and use the object directly after
initialization.
* Java users use hacks to do the same, even more, cause they're allowed to
call logic through method calls inside "initializer" block.
In some cases when you deal a lot with DTO objects, object instantiation
and properties initialization is very verbose and introduces a lot of noise.
class CustomerDTO {
public Uuid $id;
public string $name;
public Email $email;
public Address $address;
public City $city;
public Country $country;
public PhoneNumber $phoneNumber;
public etc...
}
Given above DTO class instantiation and initialization now requires:
* INSTANTIATE class and assign to a variable: $obj = new CustomerDTO();
* FOR EACH (can be many) needed property use the variable with object
instance and assign the property value: $obj->property = $value;
Now when you deal a lot with objects like that you can see you're
constantly repeating yourself with $obj-> part all the lines down before
you
probably would use that instance. There is no need for the constructor in
such objects, they're purpose is to transfer data between app layers.
Last months I've been working on a project which often requires to create
an entity with data decoded from JSON format, most of them had
many fields|properties required and only some of them were optional (even
those optional were nullable so possibly I could initialize them with null
once again),
so the case with which I had a lot to do was creating factories which
instantiate and for each property initialize value just to be able to
return newly created instance in the end.
That's when I thought object initializer could reduce a lot of boilerplate.
That's when I started thinking of many places where I could use that, where
my IDE could help me to write code faster without all that noise of
constantly repeating myself.
The syntax is similar to other languages.
The narrow case described in BC changes is already deprecated and in my
opinion, probably even not used or very rare.
The future scope features can potentially save even more strikes but that's
not the main reason about that RFC - nice to have but let's start with
something.
Regards,
Michał Brzuchalski
