Failing Forward

Well… not quite.

This might be an old, tired, boring hack to some, but it’s new to me.  I had a function – call it f()… my math background won’t leave me alone – and I needed it to take several forms.  In one place, I wanted to pass in a single value, and in another place, I wanted f() to operate on an array of such values.  But PHP does not support function overloading because it’s not cool enough.* After a bit of thought, I came up with a pretty sane way of having the cake and eating it, too.

public function f( $x ) {
  if ( !is_array( $x ) ) {
    $x = array( $x );
  }
  foreach ( $x as $item ) {
    // Do your work on each element
  }
  return;
}

Cheers!

*This is actually an artifact of the extreme flexibility of the language.  Because of PHP’s loose, dynamic typing, there isn’t a sane way for PHP to be able to tell the difference between a call to go( $a ) where $a holds an integer and go( $b ) where $b holds a string (read: there isn’t a compelling enough excuse for anyone to waste their time implementing such a feature).