Variadic static constructors ?

[drupol]

I'm just throwing this here so I don't forget!

What do you think about having variadic static constructors?

from:

public static function fromIterable(iterable $iterable): self

to:

public static function fromIterable(iterable ...$iterable): self

[AlexandruGG]

interesting idea. Is there a specific use case where you thought it would be helpful?

My concerns with this are:

• will it work for all the static constructors? I'm thinking it might not work very easily with some of them
• it might confuse users depending on which approach we take with this. For example:

$col1 = Collection::fromIterable([1, 2, 3]); // this is clear, I get Collection([1, 2, 3])

/**
* This one is not super clear, am I getting:
* A) Collection([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]) -> the iterables get merged
* B) Collection(Collection([1, 2, 3]), Collection([4, 5, 6])) -> I get a collection where each iterable gets put into a collection
* C) Collection([[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]]) -> I get a collection where each iterable is kept in a separate iterable (e.g. an array)
*/ 
$col2 = Collection::fromIterable([1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]);

[drupol]

Basically, I'm thinking about this... it would be based on MultipleIterableIterator instead of IterableIterator.

public static function fromIterable(iterable ...$iterables): self
{
    return new self(
        static fn (iterable ...$iterables): Iterator => new MultipleIterableIterator(...$iterables),
        ...$iterables
    );
}

[AlexandruGG]

I see, I suspected this. So effectively it will behave like scenario A) ?

[drupol]

Yep

[AlexandruGG]

So on this, would it be for other constructors or only for fromIterable? Could you make a list with the ones that would be doable?

[drupol]

I think it could be done for:

• fromFile
• fromIterable
• fromResource
• fromString

[AlexandruGG]

for fromString the second argument is the delimiter. Would this have to move to being the first argument and the variadic strings to the second?

[drupol]

Oops, indeed! Then we have to remove fromString of that list.