Monday, May 22. 2006

Phly_Struct? no, Phly_Hash...

After some discussion with Paul and Mike, I was convinced that 'Struct' was a bad name for Phly_Struct; structs are rarely if ever iterable, and one key feature of Phly_Struct is its iterable nature.

The question is: what to name it? Associative arrays go by a variety of names in different languages. In Perl, they're 'hashes'; Ruby and Javascript, 'collections'; Python, 'dictionaries'. I ruled out 'Phly_Dictionary' immediately, as (a) I don't want it to be confused with online dictionaries, and (b), it's too long. The term 'Collection' also feels too long (although I write things like 'Cgiapp2_ErrorException_Observer_Interface', so I don't know why length should be such an issue), as well as unfamiliar to many PHP developers. Hash can imply cryptographic algorithms, but, overall, is short and used often enough in PHP circles that it makes sense to me.

So, I've renamed Phly_Struct to Phly_Hash, and updated Phly_Config to use the new package as its dependency. In addition, I've had it implement Countable, so you can do things like:


$idxCount = count($struct);
 

Go to the channel page for instructions on adding Phly to your PEAR channels list, and grab the new package with pear install -a phly/Phly_Hash, or pear upgrade -a phly/Phly_Config.

Posted by Matthew Weier O'Phinney in PHP at 17:08 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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What about C++'s Map? Hash seems like a bit bad because it describes implementation not function.

But I'm only expressing my thoughts here, it's your class so you get to name it. :-)
#1 stepz on 2006-05-23 08:36 (Reply)
I considered Map briefly as well -- but didn't want it to be confused with a Google Map API. ;-)

No matter how you look at it, there's going to be a problem with the name. My goals were short, and not too easily confused with another technology.
#1.1 Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Link) on 2006-05-23 08:56 (Reply)

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