Chris Weldon’s Blog » I Hate PHP Sometimes

I Hate PHP Sometimes

June 14th, 2009

As one of the first few languages I learned, PHP has a special place in my heart. I am able to do a lot with the language. But sometimes, I wish that the core development team would actually make it into a full object-oriented language. See more of the story for the exact reason.

I was writing a compare function in one of my objects. However, I ran into a problem with trying to use the original compare() function I created because it was static, and the way I was trying to call it won’t be around until PHP 5.3.0:

    public function itemExists($item)
    {
        $className = get_class($item);
        foreach ($this->_items as $lItem) {
            if ($className == get_class($lItem) &&
                $className::compare($item, $lItem) == 0) {
                return true;
            }
        }
        return false;
    }

In a nutshell, being able to call a static function for a class through a variable won’t be around till PHP 5.3.0. This is one of my pet peeves about PHP - not having all the OO features that other real OO languages already have.

Now, onto the second facet I hate - not being able to overload functions:

    /**
     * Performs a comparison between two objects of this type to determine if they're equal or different
     * 
     * Currently, the return value returns -1 if $a->_id < $b->_id, otherwise +1 if $a->_id > $b->_id. 
     * It returns 0 if the ids are equal.
     * 
     * @param   Module $a
     * @param   Module $b
     * @return  int
     */
    public static function compare($a, $b)
    {
    	if ($a->getId() == $b->getId()) return 0;
    	return ($a->getId() > $b->getId()) ? 1 : -1;
    }
 
    /**
     * Performs a comparison between this object and another object to determine if they're equal or equivalent
     * 
     * Refer to the rules of the static <code>compare()</code> function for the results of the comparison. 
     * 
     * @param   Module $object
     * @return  int
     */
    public function compare($object)
    {
    	return self::compare($this, $object);
    }

The result when running unit tests:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare Group::compare()

*fumes*

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