Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. Hi, this is Episode 41. Today I'm talking with Stephen Wade about an RFC that he's produced, called __toArray(). Hi, Steven, would you please introduce yourself?

Hi, my name is Steven Wade. I'm a software engineer for a company called follow up boss. I've been using PHP since 2007. And I love the language. So I wanted to be able to give back to it with this RFC.

What brought you to the point of introducing this RFC?

This is a feature that I've I've kind of wish would have been in the language for years, and talking with a few people who encouraged it's kind of like the rule of starting a user group right? If there's not one and you have the desire, then you're the person to do it. A few people encouraged and say: Well, why don't you go out and write it. So I've spent the last two years kind of trying to work up the courage or research it enough or make sure I write the RFC the proper way, and then also actually have the time to commit to writing it and following up with any of the discussions as well.

Okay, so we've mentioned the word RFC a few times. But we haven't actually spoken about what it is about. What are you wanting to introduce into PHP?

I want to introduce a new magic method. The as he said, the name of the RFC is the __toArray(). And so the idea is that you can cast an object, if your class implements this method, just like it would toString(). If you cast it manually to array then that method will be called if it's implemented. Or as, as I said, in the RFC, array functions will it can it can automatically cast that if you're not using strict types.

Oh, so only if it's not strictly typed. So if its weakly typed would call the toArray() method if the function's argument or type hint array.

Yes, and that is actually something that came up during the discussion period, which is something again, this is why we have discussions, right? Is to kind of solicit feedback on things we don't think about it, we may overlook or, and so someone did point out that it is, you know, it would not function that way, or you would not expect it to be automatically cast for you, if you're using strict types.

Okay.

The RFC has been updated to reflect that as well.

So now the RFC says it won't be automatically called just for type hint.

Correct.

Not everybody is particularly fond of magic methods. What would you say about the criticism that introducing even more of them would be sort of counterproductive, because you'll end up not necessarily knowing what happens if you start calling a method, when you do a cost, for example.

The beauty of PHP is in its simplicity. And so adding more and more interfaces, kind of expands class declarations enforcement's and in my opinion, can lead to a lot of clutter. And so I think PHP is already very magical. And the precedent has been set to add more magic to it with 7.4 with the introduction of serialize and unserialize magic methods, and so for me it's just kind of a, it's a tool. I don't think that it's necessarily a bad thing or a good thing. It's just another option for the developer to use.

Two episodes ago, I spoke with Nicolas Grekas about a Stringable interface that he suggested to introduce, which is a little bit similar to sort of the casting with toArray(). And hence, do you think it would have make sense to have an __toArray() also happen if the class implements a interface with a typed function argument?

I think that would be two separate RFCs. I think the first one to kind of get it on par with what's what we have now in PHP would be to introduce the toArray(). And then a separate one would be if we wanted to follow suit with an arrayable interface.

And which is the same thing that happens with the Stringable interface, right? We have had toString() for how many years, decades? But from what I understand, if you have a typed property "string", it would also call the toString() method when it's defined on an object that's being passed in, or do I misunderstand that, there are misremember that?

I haven't followed that one too closely. I've kind of been catching up on some of the discussion today. But and yeah, I don't know off the top of my head what that would do.

I didn't mean with the ori.. with the newly suggested Stringable interface with adults we currently have.

I'm not sure how that would work.

I don't know, either. That's what I'm asking you.

With the array and with the typed properties? That's a good question. That's again some feedback, we kind of need to that I need to think through

Because I think it would make sense to at least behave the same and I don't particularly mind which way it goes. Me that's, that's a personal opinion here.

And that's a great idea I need to haven't played with 7.4 too much, I need to pull it down and try and just see what the behaviour of string is because that's the main goal of this is to try and just get this on a parity, functionality parity with with what's toString() will do. And so if that is how it handles it with typed properties and I would want to implement that as well.

In a similar way. I don't also know what happens if if you have toString() available in a class and you pass it in as an argument that is typed as string.

Even though at least when my test was weak types, it will actually cast that for you. If you have that. String argument type hint, it will cast it and then that will be a copy. So it will actually just be the result of that cast to string. I do not think I think it throws an error if you have a strict type set.

No, I think it'd be very similar, right. It's just how you want to use it in user land, you know, the __toArray() is you're going to you could cast it yourself ,or you can with weak types PHP could cast for you in the appropriate circumstances. If you want the same functionality. In some for now, you would need to call, you know, the __serialize() yourself with the toArray(). In the future, you could implement the toArray() and then your serialize could actually just cast this object to array, and then that should actually convert that for you. And then serialise will then return array so you're not duplicating how you want that object represented when it's an array.

So the RFC mentions that when you do a print_r of person is called __toArray(). But that's not particularly a cast. So why would it do it here, but not for method arguments, for example?

That is a product of this being my first time and that was a mistake that was thankfully pointed out during the discussion period and has been corrected.

I read this RFC a week or two ago or so. And I haven't.. I should have reread it this morning that. I did not so my apologies for not being fully up to date here. There's some array functions in PHP like sort() that operate on an array as a reference right? That can't particularly work if you first have to cast to an array, which is what your current RFC now just. I mean, toArray() only gets called when you cast to an array or when it's a weakly typed argument. But how would it work for methods or functions that accept an array by reference?

At least the way I proposed it, they would throw an error as it currently does. Again for my test and trying to keep this within parity with the toString. I don't believe there are many functions that will operate on toString on, on a string by reference, as there are with arrays. From what I can recall is that it would throw an error. If you try to operate by reference on an object that implements toString, it will throw an error.

And it wouldn't just fall back to using an object because that'd be very strange behaviour in that case, I suppose.

Basically, if it's if it's not something that can be cast or converted to an array through this method, and it's just going to be the same functionality you have in current PHP, which will be throw an error.

Going to go for the principle of least astonishment or something.

Yeah, I don't want to introduce too many changes to it. I just want to be able to cast.

I think that is a great idea. Actually, I mean, the same thing I've spoken with Nikita about, that introducing features step by step makes it a lot easier for people to comprehend what you actually end up doing. And there's also less, less chance of people getting bogged down in liking a specific aspect of the RFC but not of the other RFC parts. And we end up not merging the whole thing with the sub part of it.

And that's why I was very purposeful and not including any kind of write. You write, you cannot write to a class that implements toArray(). You know, as you will with array ArrayObject, because that we have that for a reason. So this is different functionality, we just wanted to keep it small, and just have this little helper

I read in the RFC, something called get_mangled_object_vars(), but I didn't quite understand what it was.

So that was actually a function introduced in 7.4, as a direct result of my original proposal trying to see what people thought in the internals and in the community of this feature. Sometime in spring, last year 2019, I began this discussion, and there was some initial feedback with folks saying that it would cause some breaking changes in their libraries or their code, because they are overloading the casting. Right now, if you cast an object, I guess you get insight into the object's internals without any side effects. And so I think that's how Symfony's var dumper works. And that's how they're able to display some of that information. So that was concern by introducing this, that functionality would break. And so to introduce a method that would give you the same benefits without overloading the casting, the get_mangled_object_vars() was introduced and accepted and implement in 7.4.

And that returns the object properties with their special characters in place. Because PHP internally, if you have a private method, the name for both methods and property is done by doing a null character, the name of the class, a null character then the property name. So that's what that would return, I suppose.

I believe so.

I ran into a similar issue in Xdebug, because in some cases, you want to call get_debug_info, which is what people implement for getting debug info for their objects. But in other cases, you don't want to do it because you want to see everything that happens internally, or you want to see all the properties that exist. So there's kind of a tricky one. And I think at some point with toArray also happening, I might actually end up adding the output of both toArray() and get_debug_info separate sort of fake properties into the Xdebug output. But of course that only works if toArray() has no side effects. I don't think there's any way of preventing that in the toArray method that you can now implement that it doesn't change any information in normal properties, for example, right?

And that's kind of some of the internals of it that I'm not fully familiar with. With it, I'm hoping to kind of, you know, the discussion period will help eliminate some of that.

I don't think you'd be able to actually.

Just recently, we were able to throw an exception from the toString. I don't know if you can actually do any kind of operations, write operations on the object within the toString? I do? That's a good question. And I do look that up. And whatever that behaviour is, we'd want to mimic here as well.

I believe you can. It's normal PHP code, right? And if you don't want to do it, you need to clone it first, which is something you could choose as an implementation, right? You could first clone the class and then call the toArray method on the cloned object. I don't think we have any protection for that. The RFC is currently in the discussion phase. At the time of recording, we're talking about the discussion period. When I sort of thinking of ending that and going for vote?

I think this is actually going to be probably a longer period of discussion. And I think most RFC is most fleshed out just because of the nature of it. I am a full time employee full time, father, husband, and also student, as well. And so I don't have a lot of time to do this. And I want to do it right. I want to be able to respond to this. And so the discussion opened up a week ago, and this morning is the first time I've had to be able to respond to that and update the RFC. And so I because I really care about this and would love this feature to go in. I want to continue to solicit discussion and advice and questions and to be able to answer them all and do that. So however long it takes. Ideally, I would love it to be closed, voted on, accepted and implemented in time to be able to get in for the feature freeze for 8.0.

For that you have about four months. Would you have anything else to add that I forgot? Or you want to add that you think it's interesting to know about this RFC?

Yeah, the only thing I would add is I've seen discussion, someone posted the RFC on Reddit and I've seen discussions with people like it, people hate it. They want to move one way or the other again, it's just It's a small feature, it's a helper. It's a tool that you can use. Is it perfect? No. Is it going to satisfy everybody? No. You've got the people who are want more functional and procedural you got people who want more OOP. I think it's just another helpful tool that could be in your tool belt. If you use it great. If you don't, you don't have to touch it.

Very well. Thank you, Steven, for taking the time to talk to me this afternoon. I'm looking forwards on this coming to vote at some point.

Thank you for having me on the show. And let me explain the purpose and the reasoning behind this RFC. And thank you very much for giving a voice to those looking to improve the language.

Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 40. Again, I'm talking with Nikita. Perhaps we should rename this podcast to the Derick and Nikita Show at some point in the future. This time we're going to talk about a bunch of smaller RFC that he produced related to tweaking PHP syntax for PHP 8. Nikita, would you please introduce yourself?

Hi, I'm Nikita and I do PHP core developement on behalf of JetBrains. We have a couple of new and not very exciting RFCs to discuss.

Sometimes non not exciting is also good to talk about. Anyway, the first one that caught my eye was a RFC called static return type. So we have had return types for well, but what is special about static?

So PHP has three magic special class names that's self, referring to the current class, parent referring to the well parent class, and static, which is the late static binding class name. And that's very similar to self. If no inheritance is involved, then static is the same as self introducing refers to the current class. However, if the method is inherited, and you call this method on the child class, then self is still going to refer to the original class, so the parent. While static is going to refer to the class on which the method was actually called.

Even though the method wasn't overloaded

Exactly. In the way one can think of static as: You can more or less replace static with self. But then you would have to actually copy this method inside every class where.

You have not explained the difference between self and static. Why would you want to use static as a return type instead of self?

There are a couple of use cases. I think the three ones mentioned in the RFC are. The first one is named constructors. So usually in PHP, we just use the construct method. Well, if we had to give this method, a type, a return type, then the return type will be static. Because of course, the constructor always returns while the class you're actually constructing, not some kinda parent class. And named constructors are just a pattern where you use a static method instead of a constructor, for example, because you have multiple different ways of constructing an object and you want to distinguish them by name.

Could we also call those factory methods?

Yeah, that's also related pattern. So for named constructors, you usually also want to return the object that it is actually called on.

It makes sense attached there because of that then creates a contract that you know that is named constructor is going to return that same class and not something else. Because there's no requirements that would otherwise require that same class, like you'd have to construct.

Exactly, yeah. The other pattern. These I think maybe that popularised by PSR, maybe 7 or something, the HTTP request object interface, the object is actually immutable. And the way you change it is by calling it with something method. And this method is going to return you a new object with this particular bit of information replaced. And again, usually for these kinds of API's, you also want to, you want to return the class that the methods actually call them. So if you extend this kind of API, you don't want to get objects of the parent class back. Right the third way, and I think the like by a pretty large margin, the most common one, is just normal fluid mthods. So where each method returns this. This is always an instance of static. So if you extend the class then this is going to be the extending class of the parent class. For this particular case, in PHP there is also a different convention where instead of returning static, you actually need right, return $this. So you use $this as a one word type, a special types indicates this type of method. So static would be a slightly weaker form of that. But we might still add the special $this case in the future.

Because static would only enforce it's the same class but not to the same object.

Exactly.

Are you intending to add that to this RFC?

I like to keep RFCs like different issues separated.

It makes it easy to talk about them and get them accepted or not.

I'm not totally convinced on the $this thing, because static is in the end. I mean, we already allow self return types, we allow parent. It make sense to allow static. But this is not really a type or some kind of extra contact contract on top of the type system. And I'm not sure it makes sense to open this position.

Okay, in which position would you be able to use the static keyword? You've already mentioned the return types, there are other places as well?

No, you can only use it in return types, it would simply not be sound. So it would violate the liskov substitution principle in any other place. The reason why you can use static in return types, is that static is basically a restriction on each inheriting class. So in your original class, static is the same as self. Then in the inheriting class, static is again the same as self, but in the inheriting class. And the inheriting class is a subclass or a subtype of the parent class. So this is allowed by the liskov substitution principle or by our variance rules. If you do the same things for parameters, you would also go from having a parameter for the parent class to parameter for the child class. So you would restrict the amount of inputs that are allowed in this parameter. And that's invalid. And the same argument also goes for properties.

The RFC also talks a little bit about variance and subtyping. How is static considered here differently from self, or if you just explained exactly that?

static is considered a sub type of self. If you have a parent method that uses a self return type, you can have a child method that uses a static return type, because static is ta further restriction. So self allows, still allows you to return the parent class, while static does not allow it. So you restrict the amount of return values and that's valid. While going the other direction. So replacing the static type and the parent method ,with the self type in the child method that would not be valid. Because, you make the amount of low values larger.

And that is exactly the same as the other variance rules that we have since PHP seven for of course. The the last thing the RFC mentions or actually don't quite remember whether it mentions is, is whether you can also use static as part of a union type.

So yes, you can.

Okay, that's the simple answer. I like simple answers.

Together with the other restrictions. So that union type has to be in the return type position. But apart from that, you can.

That's good to hear.

There is actually one more tricky thing regarding the property types. Without a lot of static and property types because as I mentioned, it would violate our variance rules. But unfortunately we have the extra issue that we also have static properties. So if you write public static foobar, then is that static for a static property or for a static type?

Right, because we don't enforce that a static goes or goes before or behind public, private, or protected.

Yeah.

At least not in the syntax. I mean, I think coding standards actually do most of the time require the static to be before.

Even the coding standards they would require you to write it as public static, not this static public.

Oh, really? Okay. I thought was the other way around. Yeah, that is difficult. Because then you don't know which static is meant here.

Yes, and we just allow on the, disallow it on the grammar level. It's actually a bit ugly, because we have to like duplicate the whole type grammar two times, once to include static, once to not include it, just to deal with this ugly of conflict.

That's what happens when you come with something clever. You need clever workarounds.

So it's unfortunate that the static keyword has like three or maybe four completely different meanings in PHP. Simply I think, simply because people wanted to re use a keyword, instead of introducing a new one

Because introducing new keywords might end up meaning breaking people's code.

On the downside, reusing keywords makes code confusing, because well, at least I got the impression that some people find the use of static for late static binding somewhat confusing. And I can also see if you see methods that has signature public static, whatever and return static, and you're not like super familiar with what all of that means.

And that is quite a common pattern because this named constructors are static methods that return static. Let's move on to the next one, which is a tiny RFC that you came up with, which is the Class Name Literal on objects. What does this do?

The syntax where you write a class name, then the double colon class. And that just returns you the fully qualified class name. For example, have a use statement for that class, you get back the full name instead of the short name. I think we've had this since PHP 5.5. And it's a great feature because it's like makes it clear where you're referencing the class and not just some random string. And that means, for example, that that IDE refactorings could work better and so on.

Okay.

The actual RFC is very simple. Currently, the class syntax is only allowed on like literal class names, but you can take an object variable and get the class of that object using the syntax.

However, PHP has a function for that already, which is called get_class() right?

Exactly. This is essentially just syntax sugar for get_class(). The reason why we want to have the syntax sugar is really not so much that writing get_class() is particularly hard, but just that people expect it to be there. This class syntax looks a lot like a constant access, like a class constant access. So it looks like every class has a magic constant called class. Usually you are able to access class constants on objects. So you can write object, the double colon, and the constant thing. And that works. So in that case, we just take the class of the object and access it on that class. For consistency reasons, it only makes sense that you can do the same with this particular magic concept as well. There's really all the motivation

Originally the class literal colon colon class is resolved at compile time. Of course, that can't happen on object colon colon class. Is that still true or no longer?

So it really was true in the first place. For normal class names of cours is resolved at compile time. Actually one of the like gotchas with the syntax is that some people expected to validate that the class actually exists. So they expect that this gets auto loaded and they get an error if it doesn't exist, doesn't happen. So you can reference some non existing class with this syntax just fine. The usually your IDE is going to show a warning for that. I mean, as we just discussed, we also have a couple of magic class names. So we have self, parent, and static. The static one in particular, also always has to be resolved at runtime, because we don't know what the what class the method is actually going to be called on. Actually, self and parent also sometimes have to be resolved at runtime. And there are two cases where that can happen. One is if you use traits, because in that case self refers to the using class, not to the trait. So in closures the self class, refers to the bound scope. The bind to method, there is like the last argument on, is the scope you're using. So in those cases, it's already dynamically resolved.

Okay. The RFC mentions one specific area where you can't use colon colon class. In which situation can you still not use colon colon class on objects?

You can always use it on an object. I think what you're referring to is that normally, for normal class constants, you can also put the class name inside the string. I mean, put the string class name inside the variable and then access the constant on that variable.

Oh, right. Yes.

For the double colon class syntax, we don't want to allow that. Because, well, first this is kinda useless, because it will just return you back the same string you gave it. And I think in that case, the fact that the class name is not validated, this is especially confusing.

Okay, that makes sense. So you can only call colon colon class on literal class names that you already could, as well as on variables that contain an object?

That's right? Yeah.

That sounds great. Does it show up differently in reflection?

This magic class constant actually doesn't show up in reflection at all. It looks like a constant both it's really a special syntax that just happens to share the look with constants.

Do you expect any controversies about this?

I don't think so.

I don't think so either. I can't really see anything that people could complain about too much. I think. I however, do think that for the next RFC that you came up with the variable syntax tweaks, there will be a little bit of haggling about whether this is good idea to do. In PHP seven, zero, we got this uniform variable syntax. Could you give a brief reminder of what it was about?

That was about, well fixing a couple of syntax inconsistencies when it comes to variables syntax. So variable syntax in PHP is extremely, extremely magic. Like our expression, syntax nice and regular. But the variable syntax is a huge assortment of special rules and that RFC made those rules little bit less special at more regular.

From what I understood we missed a few inconsistencies that we probably also should have addressed in that RFC. And that is what you know, trying to tweak again?

All of these remaining consistencies are like really, really minor things and edge cases. But weirdly, all or at least most of them are something that someone at some point ran into, and either open the bug or wrote me an email or pinged me on Twitter. So people somehow managed to still run into these things.

The RFC mentions four specific things that we've missed. What is the first one?

Yeah, so it's probably going to be somewhat hard to talk about some of these examples.

I know because I think some of them make no sense whatsoever.

Yeah.

Because how do you call a method on the string?

Context for this one is I have a nice little extension called scalar objects, which allows you to more or less define methods on strings, on integers, on arrays and so on. In with the uniform variable syntax, we have allowed calling methods on string literals. That actually makes no real sense with baseline PHP. But if you're using scalar objects, then this is a useful feature because you can do something like take a string that rule and call length on it, while otherwise we'll have to wrap it in brackets.

So it's just a syntax change pretty much.

Well, what this one particular is about that right now, this works if it's a literal string, but if you have any variables inside it than suddenly stops to work, which is just a very.

So it is the interpolated strings inside double quotes, the dollar variable name syntax. That's the problem that?

Yeah.

The second one is called constant derefenceability, which is a word I can't pronounce. And my text edit says it's not a word. So what do you mean by it?

That's a good question. I think the term is more or less picked up from C, where we have pointers. And we can dereference pointers to access what the pointer points to. So that's the star operator in C. In PHP, we use the term dereference to also access some kind of structure in some way. For example, to access an array element, so array dereference, or to access an object properties, object reference and so on. That particular one is, I think two things. One is that you can, for example, access the first character of a constant. So read the constant name then brackets zero. Well, maybe even not the first time I can think of a better example. Um, you haven't the constant that contains an array, and you want to access a specific key on that area. That's something you can do already you right now. The same syntax does not work if the constant is in magic constant. What also doesn't work is if you use the our alternative array access syntax. So we have the square brackets, that's what people should use. And we have the curly braces, which is the alternative way to access arrays and which is actually deprecated as of 7.4. I'm not totally sure that that's going to be removed in PHP 8 or not. If it's going to be removed, then this part is a moot point. But yeah, this is again, I think, from a practical perspective, not really interesting. The only situation where I think this is useful is again, of course scalar objects, because it means you can call the methods on the constant

Okay, which in syntax is the grammar currently disallowed doing that.

Currently it's disallowed and that would allow it.

A third one is related. I think it's a class constant dereferenceability.

So someone complained about this one on Twitter. I don't know how they ended up trying to do this. Something you can do right now is, you can access a static property. And then you can interpret the content of that static property as a class name, and access another static property on that. So you can change chain these static property accesses. For some reason, the same does not work with class constant access. So static property accesses can be chained. But class constant accesses can't be. Again, for no particular reason, this change would allow that to happen as well.

This is even a change that makes sense without having to use scalar objects.

That one is. I wouldn't write that kind of code, but it logically makes sense.

And then the last one is, in the RFC is called arbitrary expression support for new and instanceof.

Yeah, so this is probably the only one that's actually useful for something. PHP has well, a bunch of places where usually you have to place either an identifier or a namespace name, but class name, method name, or a property name, and so on, or even the variable name. For all of these places, we usually support some kind of special syntax to instead use a general expression. For example, some of the variable with a static name, you can use curly braces to use a dynamic name instead.

I think for new, we did it at some point already.

For new, this doesn't exist yet. So you can use a variable as class name, but you can't actually compute the class name as part of the expression.

I think what I was referring to, is you can use braces around the whole new class extension, so you can call methods. So that's that's what I meant, but this is specifically using an expression behind new.

Yeah, so these are like two things. One is whether you use an expression for the new class name, and the others for the use the new itself as an expression. And yeah, the same, so yeah, right now, we don't support that for new. And we also don't support it for instanceof, so the the right hand side, which consists of that as the class new. The RFC just proposes to allow an expression and parenthesis in there. And this kind of stuff is, again, not well not particularly useful. But it is useful for things like code generation, where you may have to insert arbitrary expressions sets up your coins. And there are actually some nice hacks that you can use right now. So you can use a variable with a complex expression inside it, where you assign to the variable itself and then return its name.

I don't think I understand this. You're saying you can construct a string with a complex expression in it.

Not a string. You you write something like new variable, but with a curly brace syntax, and in there you return you start off with the string containing some kind of dummy variable name, and then you concatenate that with an empty string. But that empty string is computed by doing the assignments to the variable name that you're actually going to return.

I still don't understand this. You know, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to link to a example for this in the show notes.

It's not really important. You can just cut off this part.

Yep sure, I can do that too-perfectly fine.

Nice hack.

But let's not teach too many hacks to people such I think. Thank you for taking the time with me today, Nikita to talk about a bunch of little RFCs that you've written. Perhaps by the time this podcast comes out, we've started voting on them and we'll see what happens to them.

Thanks for having me once again.