A few days ago Anthony Ferrara wrote down some thoughts on the future of PHP. I concur with most of his opinions, but not all of them. In this post I’ll focus on one particular aspect: Turning primitive types like strings or arrays into “pseudo-objects” by allowing to perform method calls on them.

Lets start off with a few examples of what this entails:

$str = "test foo bar" ; $str -> length (); // == strlen($str) == 12 $str -> indexOf ( "foo" ) // == strpos($str, "foo") == 5 $str -> split ( " " ) // == explode(" ", $str) == ["test", "foo", "bar"] $str -> slice ( 4 , 3 ) // == substr($str, 4, 3) == "foo" $array = [ "test" , "foo" , "bar" ]; $array -> length () // == count($array) == 3 $array -> join ( " " ) // == implode(" ", $array) == "test foo bar" $array -> slice ( 1 , 2 ) // == array_slice($array, 1, 2) == ["foo", "bar"] $array -> flip () // == array_flip($array) == ["test" => 0, "foo" => 1, "bar" => 2]

Here $str is just a normal string and $array just a normal array - they aren’t objects. We just give them a bit of object-like behavior by allowing to call methods on them.

Note that this isn’t far off dreaming, but something that already exists right now. The scalar objects PHP extension allows you to define methods for the primitive PHP types.

The introduction of method-call support for primitive types comes with a number of advantages that I’ll outline in the following:

An opportunity for a cleaner API

The likely most common complaint you get to hear about PHP is the inconsistent and unclear naming of functions in the standard library, as well as the equally inconsistent and unclear order of parameters. Some typical examples:

// different naming conventions strpos str_replace // totally unclear names strcspn // STRing Complement SPaN strpbrk // STRing Pointer BReaK // inverted parameter order strpos ( $haystack , $needle ) array_search ( $needle , $haystack )

While this issue is often overemphasized (we do have IDEs), it is hard to deny that the situation is rather suboptimal. It should also be noted that many functions exhibit problems that go beyond having a weird name. Often edge-case behaviors were not properly considered, thus creating the need to specially handle them in the calling code. (For the string functions edge-cases usually involve empty strings or offsets that are at the very end of a string.)

A common suggestion is to just add a huge number of function aliases in PHP 6, which will unify the function names and parameter orders. So we’d have string\pos() , string\replace() , string\complement_span() or something in that direction. Personally (and this seems to be the opinion of many php-src devs) this makes little sense to me. The current function names are deeply ingrained into the muscle memory of any PHP programmer and applying a few trivial cosmetic changes to them just doesn’t seem worth it.

The introduction of an OO API for primitive types on the other hand offers an opportunity of an API redesign as a side effect of switching to a new paradigm. It also offers a truly clean slate, without the need to meet any expectations coming with the old procedural API. Two examples:

I would very much like to have the $string->split($delimiter) and $array->join($delimiter) methods, which are the universally accepted names for this functionality (as opposed to explode and implode ). On the other hand I would be very uncomfortable to have a string\split($delimiter) function with this behavior, because the existing str_split function does something completely different (chunking).

and methods, which are the universally accepted names for this functionality (as opposed to and ). On the other hand I would be very uncomfortable to have a function with this behavior, because the existing function does something completely different (chunking). I would certainly like the new API to use exceptions for error reporting. As this is an OO API that is automatically a given. Exceptions could of course also be used with a renamed procedural API, however this goes against the current convention where all procedural functions use warnings for error handling. That’s not set in stone, but it certainly is a discussion I would like to avoid ;)

That’s my main motivation for an OO API on primitive types: A clean slate, allowing us to implement a set of properly designed APIs. But of course that’s not the only advantage of such a move. The OO syntax offers a number of further benefits, discussed in the following.

Improved readability

Procedural calls commonly do not chain well. Consider the following example:

$output = array_map ( function ( $value ) { return $value * 42 ; }, array_filter ( $input , function ( $value ) { return $value > 10 ; });

At a glance, what are array_map and array_filter applied to? In what order are the calls happening? The variable $input is hidden somewhere in the middle of two closures and the function calls are written in the reverse order of how they are actually applied. Now the same example using an OO syntax:

$output = $input -> filter ( function ( $value ) { return $value > 10 ; }) -> map ( function ( $value ) { return $value * 42 ; });

I daresay that in this case the order of operations (first filter then map) and the source array $input are a lot more obvious.

The example is of course somewhat contrived, because array_map and array_filter are another example of functions with swapped parameter order (which is why the input array ends up in the middle). Another example (this time from real code) where the input parameter stays in the same position:

substr ( strtr ( rtrim ( $className , '_' ), '\\' , '_' ), 15 );

In this case you end up with a string of additional parameters '_'), '\\', '_'), 15 , which are hard to associate with the corresponding function calls. Compare this to the version using methods:

$className -> trimRight ( '_' ) -> replace ( '\\' , '_' ) -> slice ( 15 );

Here the operations and their arguments are tightly grouped and once again the order of the method calls matches the order in which they are executed.

Another readability benefit that can be derived from this syntax is the absence of the needle/haystack problem. While aliasing lets us resolve this issue by introducing some uniform parameter order convention, the problem simply does not exist in the first place with an OO API:

$string -> contains ( $otherString ) $array -> contains ( $someValue ) $string -> indexOf ( $otherString ) $array -> indexOf ( $someValue )

Here there can be no confusion as to which part takes which role.

Polymorphism

PHP currently provides a Countable interface, which can be implemented by classes to customize the output of count($obj) . Why is this needed? Because we don’t have polymorphism for functions. We do however have polymorphism for methods:

If arrays implement $array->count() as a (pseudo-)method, the code doesn’t actually care that $array is an array. It could be any other object implementing the count() method. This basically gives us the same behavior as Countable , just without the engine hackery it requires.

This is also a much more general solution. For example you could implement a UnicodeString class, which implements all the methods of the string type, and then use normal strings and a UnicodeString s interchangeably. Well, at least that’s the theory. This would obviously only work as long as the usage is limited to just the string methods, and would fail once the concatenation operator is employed (full operator overloading is currently only supported for internal classes).

Still, I hope it’s clear that this is a rather powerful concept. The same also applies to arrays, e.g. you could have an SplFixedArray behave the same way as an array, by implementing the same interface.

Now that we’ve covered some of the advantages of this approach, lets also consider some problems it faces:

Loose Typing

Quoting from Anthony’s blog post:

[S]calars are not objects, but more importantly they are not any type. PHP relies on a type-system that truly believes that strings are integers. A lot of the flexibility to the system is based that any scalar can be converted to any other scalar with ease. […] More importantly though, due to this loose type system, you can’t 100% of the time know what type a variable will be. You can tell how you want to treat it, but you can’t tell what it is under the hood. Even with casting or scalar type hinting it isn’t a perfect situation since there are cases where types can still change.

To illustrate the issue, consider the following example:

$num = 123456789 ; $sumOfDigits = array_sum ( str_split ( $num ));

Here $num is treated as a string of digits, which is split apart using str_split and then summed using array_sum . Now try the same using methods:

$num = 123456789 ; $sumOfDigits = $num -> chunk () -> sum ();

Here the chunk() method from the string type is called on a number. What happens? Anthony suggests one solution:

So that means that all scalar operations would need to be bound to all scalar types. Which leads to an object model where scalars have all of the math methods, as well as all of the string methods. What a nightmare…

As the quote already says, that’s by no means an acceptable solution. However I think that we can absolutely get away with just throwing an error (exception!) in this case. To explain why this is viable, lets take a look at what types a PHP value can have.

Primitive types in PHP

Apart from objects, PHP has the following variable types:

null bool int float string array resource

Now, lets think about which of these actually could have meaningful methods: We’ll drop resource from consideration right away (that’s a legacy type) and have a look at the rest. Null and bool obviously have no need for methods, unless you want to invent abominations like $bool->invert() .

The vast majority of math functions don’t do well as methods either. Consider:

log ( $n ) $n -> log () sqrt ( $n ) $n -> sqrt () acosh ( $n ) $n -> acosh ()

I hope you agree that math functions read a lot better in function notation. There are of course some few methods you could reasonably apply to the number type. For example $num->format(10) reads quite nicely. However, that’s about it. There’s no real need for an OO number API, as there’s little functionality you could include. (Furthermore the current math API is not so problematic in terms of naming, as math operation names are pretty standardized.)

This leaves us with just strings and arrays. We’ve already seen that there are many nice APIs for those two types. But what does all this have to do with the loose typing issue? The important point is the following:

While it is very common to treat strings as if they were integers (e.g. coming from HTTP or DB), the inverse is not true: It is very uncommon to directly use an integer as a string. For example, the following code would really confuse me:

strpos ( 54321 , 32 , 1 );

As treating numbers as strings in this way is a rather weird operation, I think it’s totally okay to require a cast in this case. Using the original sum-of-digits example:

$num = 123456789 ; $sumOfDigits = (( string ) $num ) -> chunk () -> sum ();

Here we have clarified that, yes, we actually do want to treat that number as a string. To me this is acceptable for the cases where you want to make use of a hack like this.

For arrays the situation is even easier: It doesn’t make any sense to apply an array operation to something that isn’t an array.

Another factor that ameliorates this issue are scalar typehints (which I totally assume to be present in any PHP version this gets in - really embarrassing that we still don’t have them). If you typehint against string , the input you’ll get to see will be a string (even if the value passed to the function wasn’t - depending on the details of the typehinting implementation).

However, I don’t want to imply that there is no problem here at all. Due to incorrect function design, it can sometimes happen that an unexpected type sneaks into the code. For example substr($str, strlen($str)) will, in its wisdom, return bool(false) instead of string(0) "" . (However, that’s really just an issue with substr . The method API won’t have that issue, so you won’t run into it.)

Object passing semantics

Apart from the loose-typing problem, there is another semantic issue with pseudo-methods on primitive types: Objects in PHP have different passing semantics than other types (somewhat similar to references). If we start allowing method calls on strings and arrays, they’ll start to look like objects and some people might expect them to have object passing semantics because of that. This issue applies both to strings and arrays:

function change ( $arg ) { echo $arg -> length (); // $arg looks like object $arg [ 0 ] = 'x' ; // but doesn't have object passing semantics } $str = 'foo' ; change ( $str ); // $str stays the same $array = [ 'f' , 'o' , 'o' ]; change ( $array ); // $array stays the same

We could of course change the passing semantics. In my eyes passing large structures like arrays by-value was a pretty bad idea in the first place and I would prefer them to be passed by-object. However, that would be a pretty big backwards-compatibility break and one that’s not easy to refactor automatically (at least that would be my assumption, I did not perform tests to determine the actual impact of such a change). For strings on the other hand, by-object passing would be catastrophic, unless we make the strings fully immutable at the same time, giving up the local mutability we currently have (which I personally find quite handy - go and try to change a character in a Python string).

I don’t know if there is some nice way to resolve this issue of expectations, apart from emphasizing in our documentation that strings and arrays are only pseudo-objects with methods, not actual objects.

This issue can also be expanded to other object-related features. E.g. you could ask whether something like $string instanceof string would start to work. I’m not yet sure just how far the whole thing should go. It might be best to strictly stick with just methods, to emphasize that these are not actual objects. It might however also be good to support further features of the OO system. That point deserves further thought.

Current state

In conclusion, this approach does have a number of problems, but I don’t view them as particularly critical. At the same time this offers a great opportunity to introduce clean APIs for our most basic types and improve the readability (and writability) of code performing operations on them.

So what’s the state of this idea? From what I gathered, the folk on internals is not particularly opposed to this approach and prefers it to aliasing all the things. The main thing that’s missing to move this forward is an API proposal.

For this purpose I created the scalar objects extension, which implements this functionality as a PHP extension. It allows you to register a class which will handle method calls for the respective primitive type. An example:

class StringHandler { public function length () { return strlen ( $this ); } public function contains ( $str ) { return false !== strpos ( $this , $str ); } } register_primitive_type_handler ( 'string' , 'StringHandler' ); $str = "foo bar baz" ; var_dump ( $str -> length ()); // int(11) var_dump ( $str -> contains ( "bar" )); // bool(true) var_dump ( $str -> contains ( "hello" )); // bool(false)

I have started working on a string handler including an API specification some time ago, but never really finished that project (I hope I’ll find the motivation to pick it up again sometime soon). There are also a number of other projects working on such APIs.

So, this is one of the things I’d like to see for PHP 6. I may write another post for my other plans in that direction.