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.
