Nathan Nobbe schreef:
when it comes to create_function(), id say its just as painful as building
functions with html or writing queries by hand. namely, its prone to a lot
of string escaping which produces awful hard to read code. i mean, the
kind of code you write yourself and then look at a week later and say
'what a mess'...
agreed - in fact I think I have resorted to create_function only once, generally
when I 'need' it I just resort to writing a std. function that is defined in
or around the code that uses it (as opposed to defining the function in a suitable
functions-only include file) - and give it some oddball name that will never
cause name collisions (e.g. A2mkITdoFooBarSWmagicLanternStuff1timeBla() - completely
unreadable ofcourse but for a throw away used 5 lines up or down it will do :-)
anyway, it occurs to me that the closest thing php has to functional
languages,
thats readily usable is the variable function mechanism
http://www.php.net/manual/en/functions.variable-functions.php
theres been discussion about it on the list in the past, though often it is
spoken of as a ghost feature. its quite nice.
as an example, suppose you have a string
$blah = 'myFunc';
then if myFunc is defined as a function, it can be invoked per
$blah(/* params */);
it creates the ability to do all sorts of powerful things, such as
delegation
whereby switch statements can be eliminated, callbacks, whereby a formal
parameter could be a string that refers to a method name, and they work
on object references as well. so you can get away w/
$this->$dynamicFuncName(/* params*/);
there is a more generic form of callback .. as used by call_user_func*()
which, if used in conjunction with is_callable() can be a very neat way of
doing something that resembles meta-programming (okay I'm stretching the boat here)
at the very least it allows you a clean and tidy way of introducing functionality
into your code that can be run automatically regardless and without breakage,
in situations where you don't know at run time if the something will exist
(e.g. some optional CMS module) - following is a silly, contrived example to
give some idea of what can be done:
class foo {
private $handlers = array();
static function setHandler($cb) {
if ($cb && is_callable($cb)/* && !in_array($cb, self::$handlers) */)
self::$handlers[] = $cb;
}
static function doStuff() {
foreach(self::$handlers as $cb)
call_user_func($cb);
}
}
class bar {
function __construct() {
foo:setHandler( array($this, 'magic') );
}
function magic() {
/* er? */
}
}
and if you add interfaces and a bit of reflection into the game you can get real funky ;-)
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