Derick Rethans 0:14

Hi, I’m Derick, welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast, dedicated to explaining the latest developments in the PHP language. This is episode 84. Today I’m talking with the recently elected PHP 8.1 RMs, Ben Ramsey and Patrick Allaert. Ben, would you please introduce yourself.

Ben Ramsey 0:34

Thanks Derick for having me on the show. Hi everyone, as Derick said I’m Ben Ramsey, you might know me from the Ramsey UUID composer package. I’ve been programming in PHP for about 20 years, and active in the PHP community for almost as long. I started out blogging, then writing for magazines and books, then speaking at conferences, and then contributing to open source projects. I’ve also organized a couple of PHP user groups over the years, and I’ve contributed to PHP source and Docs and a few small ways over the years, but my first contributions to the project were actually to the PHP GTK project.

Derick Rethans 1:14

Oh, that’s a blast from the past. You know what, I actually still run daily a PHP GTK application.

Ben Ramsey 1:21

Oh, that’s interesting. What does it do?

Derick Rethans 1:23

It’s Twitter client.

Ben Ramsey 1:24

Did you write it.

Derick Rethans 1:26

I did write it. Basically I use it to have a local copy of all my tweets and everything that I’ve received as well, which can be really handy sometimes to figuring out, because I can easily search over it with SQL it’s kind of handy to do.

Ben Ramsey 1:41

It’s really cool.

Derick Rethans 1:42

Yep, it’s, it’s still runs PHP 5.2 maybe, I don’t know, five three because it’s haven’t really been updated since then.

Ben Ramsey 1:49

Every now and then there will be some effort to try to revive it and get it updated for PHP seven and eight, but I don’t know where that goes.

Derick Rethans 1:59

I don’t know where that’s gone either. In this case, for PHP eight home there are three RM, there’s Joe Watkins who has done it before, Ben, you’ve just introduced yourself, but we also have Patrick Allaert, Patrick, could you also please introduce yourself.

Patrick Allaert 2:13

Hi Derick, thank you for the invitation for the podcast, my name is Patrick Allaert. I am a Belgian freelancer, living in Brussels, and I spent half of my professional time as a IT architect and/or a PHP developer, and the other half, I am maintaining the PHP extension of Blackfire, a performance monitoring solution, initiated by Fabien Potencier.

Derick Rethans 2:39

I also continued to produce a few more videos on how to use Xdebug.

In April, no new supporters signed up.

Derick Rethans 0:14

Hi, I’m Derick. Welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to explaining the latest developments in the PHP language. This is episode 83. Today I’m talking with George Peter Banyard, about another tidying up RFC, George, would you please introduce yourself?

George Peter Banyard 0:31

Hello, my name is George and I work on PHP in my free time.

Derick Rethans 0:35

Excellent. I was just talking to Larry Garfield, and he was wondering whether you or himself, are the second often guests on this podcast, but I haven’t run a stats. But it’s good to have you on again. Following on for from other numeric RFCs, so to speak. This one is titled deprecate implicit non integer compatible floats to int conversions. That is a lovely small title you have come up with.

George Peter Banyard 1:01

Yeah, not the best title.

Derick Rethans 1:03

What is the problem that this RFC is trying to solve, or rather, what’s the change that is in this RFC is trying to solve?

George Peter Banyard 1:11

Currently in PHP, which is a dynamic language, types are not known at the statically at compile time, so it’s so everything’s mostly runtime. And most type conversions are relatively sane now in PHP 8, because like numeric strings have been kind of fixed. But one last standing issue is that floats will pass an integer check, without any notices or warnings. Although floats, don’t usually fit in integer will have like extra data which can’t be represented as an integer. For example, they can have a fractional part, or they can be infinity, or not a number if you divide, like infinity by infinity, or 0 over 0 or other things like that.

Derick Rethans 1:55

These are specific features of floating point numbers on computers?

George Peter Banyard 1:59

Yes.

Derick Rethans 2:00

Is there any prior work that is RFC is building on top of

George Peter Banyard 2:03

It builds up on top on the saner numeric string RFC, because it tries to like make the whole numericness of PHP, as a concept better and like less error prone, but in essence it’s mostly self contained. If you use a floating point number, were you should be using an integer. If the floating point number, is considered an integer because it only has like decimal zeros, and it fits in the integer range, then you’ll have like no error. So if you use 15.0 as an array key, it gets converted to 15, you’ll get don’t get any error because it’s like well it’s just 15 like it doesn’t mind. But if you do 15.5, then you’ll get like a, like a deprecation notice which will tell you it’s like, well, here’s the key gets implicitly converted, you should be aware of this because if you use 15 somewhere else, you’d be overriding the value.

Derick Rethans 2:54

Derick Rethans 0:14

Hi, I’m Derick. Welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to explaining the latest developments in the PHP language. This is episode 82. Today I’m talking with Nuno Maduro and Larry Garfield. Nuno, would you please introduce yourself?

Nuno Maduro 0:30

Hi PHP developers. My name is Nuno Maduro, and I am software engineer at Laravel, the company that owns the Laravel framework, and I have created multiple open source projects for the PHP community, such as Pest PHP, Laravel zero, collusion and more.

Derick Rethans 0:48

Alright, and Larry, could you please follow up on that.

Larry Garfield 0:51

Hello world, so I’m Larry Garfield. You may know me from several past podcasts here, various work in the PHP fig, and all around gadfly and nudge of the PHP community.

Derick Rethans 1:03

Good to have you again Larry and good to have you here today, Nuno. The RFC, that we’re talking about here today is to do with closures, and the title of the RFC is auto capturing multi statement closures, which is quite a mouthful. Can one of you explain what this RFC is about?

Nuno Maduro 1:20

As you said, the RFC title is indeed auto capturing multi statement closures. But to make it simple, we are really talking about adding multi line support to the one line arrow functions that got introduced it, in PHP 7.4. Now, this new multi line arrow functions have exactly the same features as the one line arrow functions, so they are anonymous, locally available functions; variables are auto captured lexically meaning that you don’t actually need the use keyword to manually import the use of variables, they just get auto captured from the outer scope. And the only difference really is one line arrow functions have a body with a single expression. This RFC actually allows you to use a full statement list that possibly ends with a return.

Derick Rethans 2:18

Excellent, what the syntax that you’re proposing here?

Nuno Maduro 2:22

Well, as you may know, one line arrow functions have the syntax, which is fn, parameter list, and then that arrow expression thing, and this new RFC proposes that, optionally, developers can pass a curly brackets with statements, instead of having that arrow expression syntax. Now, this curly brackets with statements, simply denotes a statement list that potentially ends with a return. Concerning the Auto Capture syntax, we will be just reusing the Auto Capture syntax and feature that already exists on one line arrow functions, meaning that you don’t need the use keyword to manually import variables. And of course, the syntax itself, in the in the feature, works the exactly same way. Concerning the syntax, it’s also important to mention that this RFC was done in combination with the short functions RFC from Larry, but I think I’m going to let Larry speak about that later on this episode.

Derick Rethans 3:26

What’s the main idea behind wanting to introduce this auto capture m