Eran Gelperin gives an overview of the current state of overloading abilities PHP has in a new blog post today:

Operator overloading is a programming language features that allows operators to act differently depending on the type of data they are operating on. Since OOP lets us create custom types (classes), there are plenty of opportunities to do useful and interesting code manipulations using operator overloading.

He talks about magic functions, the additions that the SPL made, the PECL addition operator and how much its currently being discussed on the PHP internals list.

In this new post to the PHP 10.0 blog today, Stas talks about duck typing, a method that lets the code decide the functionality to use rather than a direct relation to a parent.

Well, if you are into duck typing style of programming, it may be interesting for you to have an object that implements certain set of functions, but not necessary declares it at class definition. Languages like Smalltalk do it all day along, so why PHP couldn't?

His example defines an interface Cow and a class MooingGrassEater and a function, CowConsumer, that does the work. A classname is passed in and an instance of that class is checked with "implements" rather than "instanceof" to see if it uses the Cow interface. He points out a place where PHP itself uses something similar in user defined streams.

The PHPBuilder.com site has a quick reminder about a handy little bit of functionality PHP has to make evaluations quicker - the ternary operator.

This allows you to check for the existence of a variable (or check that the variable has a valid value) and assign a value accordingly. This is very useful when you are dealing with $_GET, $_POST, $_SESSION etc. variables, because you don't know whether the incoming variable will exist, and if it doesn't you might want to assign a default value.

An example is included and explained - evaluating an index in the _GET superglobal to see if it exists. It returns either the value itself or a false.

The IBM developerWorks website has posted the first part of a series they've created to help PHP developers become more informed about what regular expressions are and how they can harness their power for their applications.

Pattern matching is such a common chore for software that a special shorthand '" regular expressions '" has evolved to make light work of the task. Learn how to use this shorthand in your code here in Part 1 of this "Mastering regular expressions in PHP" series.

In this first part of the series, they look at the basics - the idea behind regular expressions, some of the common operators, the PHP functions to use them and example of how to use them to match/split out strings and capture just the data you need from the given input.

In this new post to the PHP Everywhere blog, John Lim asks an interesting question - why should PHP ever be taught in schools? (in response to this post)

If something is popular but hard to understand then we need an education process. To just shake our heads and give up is simply immature (or trolling). Otherwise we might as well say that English (or any other spoken language for that matter) should not be taught, because spoken languages are illogical, imprecise and therefore ... useless.

John also clears up some of the misconceptions from the other post with equality and type comparison in PHP.

Kore Nordmann has made a quick post to his blog about some "evil bugs" he's seen reoccurring in the code he writes and wanted to point them out so other developers might learn from them.

Those are 4 typical errors I introduced in my code, and spend some time debugging it, because I found them really hard to spot. Luckily, once I spotted the actual bug, I find it a lot easier the next time the typo occurs. Therefore I want to share those, so that I may save you some minutes of your life hunting stupid bugs.

His three contributions concern a "missing if", the addition of a random semicolon, operator precedence and a for loop that refuses to work. Others have contributed to the comments on the post as well.

Tobias Schlitt offers a helpful hint or two for "speeding up" your application in the form of comparison operators.

The fact that type save comparisons (ala ===) are faster in PHP than the normal comparison operator (ala ==). The reason for this is simply, that PHPs loosly-typed-ness-auto-cast-code is not even touched with ===

He also points out an interesting condition that saves a bit of computing time - comparing the isset() of a variable to true over the count() to zero. Some of his benchmarking (code) shows this in action.

WebReference.com has a new tutorial that looks at the difference sorts of operators that PHP has to offer - unary, binary and ternary - to help you with the logic in your applications.

An operator is a special character or combination of characters that operates on variables. There are 3 types of operators in PHP: unary, binary and ternary. They can be used to manipulate a variable with up to 3 arguments at a time. This article wasn't written to discuss the meaning and usage of each operator in PHP, but rather to explain the differences between these types of operators and to give examples about how each functions.

They look at the different types of operators (and include examples for each) - unary (like ! or ++), binary (things like + / == and &&) and a special case - ternary. This uses two characters in conjunction (the question mark and colon) to replace a simple sort of If statement.

The HowTo Forge website has posted the first part in a new series of tutorials to help people (programmers and non) to get into PHP and be comfortable working with it.

This first part starts from the base they've already set (installation/configuration) and actually gets into the code.

This article is the first of a series of PHP guides that aim at teaching you the basics of PHP programming. By now, I hope you would have set up your system to start actual PHP programming. Lets start PHP programming.

They keep things simple and look at topics like:

• What are tags?
• Web Page Parsing
• Operators and Operands
• Variables

Mike Naberezny has this new post on his blog today about the latest extension submitted by Sara Golemon to the PECL library - the pecl/operator extension.

This extension adds operator overloading support to PHP 5. I don't think operator overloading fits the "PHP spirit" and as such I speculate it probably won't ever make it into the core. Regardless, it's interesting that this extension is now available and certainly makes for some fun experiments, especially if you're already familiar with techniques from languages like C++.

He gives some sample code, and mentions the "magic methods" the extension allows. Later in the post, he also looks at a related package (also by Sara) that allows for self-modifying code in PHP - pecl/runkit.