Hi, I'm Derick. Welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to explaining the latest developments in the PHP language. This is episode 96. Today I'm talking with Jordan, about a user defined operator overloads RFC that he's proposing. Jordan, would you please introduce yourself?

My name is Jordan LeDoux. I've been working in PHP for quite a while now. This is the second time I have ventured to propose an RFC.

What was the first one?

The first one was the "never for parameter types", which was much more exploratory. And we talked about it a little bit. And it generated a lot of good discussion that contributed to kind of the idea formation, which was what I hope to get out of it.

Okay, but that didn't end up making it into a PHP release. As far as I understand, right?

No, I withdrew it actually, it was clear that the better way to approach the problem it was trying to solve was with a much more comprehensive solution. That particular solution was something that only required a seven line change to the engine. So I wanted to see if it was something people were okay with, or thought was a decent idea for that particular problem, much more comprehensive, like template classes, or something like that is probably the better route to go.

Well, I think the RFC that we're talking about today, is going to require quite a bit more than seven lines of code?

Quite a bit more. Yeah.

So what is this RFC that we're talking about today?

Well, user defined operator overloads is a way for PHP developers to define the ways in which objects interact with specific operators. So for instance, the plus operator, the plus sign. It's a way for those objects to kind of define their own logic as far as how that's handled, which right now, as of PHP 8.0, those were all switched to type errors. So it's not possible currently to write any code that doesn't result in a fatal error, where objects are used with operators.

Usually, I ask about every RFC, what problem are you trying to solve this? So what problem are you trying to solve this RFC?

The biggest problem that this solves is that objects contain, so objects in most programs represent a value or multiple values that have a program context. That's the most powerful thing about objects is they're contextual, and they understand the state, they understand what state the object is in, and sometimes even what state the whole program is in. And that's necessary for a lot of things. Like for instance, if you're tracking a distance, you know, you might measure that meters, and that would have a number you might have 30 meters of distance, but it also has a unit of meters. You could just represent that as an int. And