Keith Devens .com

The feature I most want in PHP 5.1:

You can overload method calls and property accesses in PHP 5. But it doesn't seem there's a way to overload array indexing so you can make an object behave like an array or dictionary. I'd love to see that become possible in PHP 5.1.

However, realistically, it's probably a total mess if you want to do that thoroughly. By thoroughly I mean that an object can behave completely like an array and can have all the array functions applied to it, including being sortable, being able to make current, next, prev (etc.) calls on it, do set differences, unions, and intersections on it, do slicing, and on and on. PHP's array type is so overloaded that making an object behave like a built-in array is probably pretty hairy.

However, I'd still like to be able to hand something an object and have other code not care whether it's actually an array or not, at least for indexing into it. For instance, say some function takes an array now -- I'd like to be able to replace that with an array-like-object that's built lazily and implements an iterator.

Python does this -- it allows you to provide array-like access to an object. How does it handle all the cases? I want this in PHP!

Update: Here's how Python does it. That's not so bad. PHP would need a little more because arrays in PHP maintain a current index as well as remember the order of insertion.

Permalink | 3 Comments | Tags: Programming | id 5146

03:50 (utc-4)
edited: 04:08 (utc-4)