compiler Not-Null pipe operator

Not-Null pipe operator

Open thekid opened this issue 3 months ago • 3 comments

Complement the null-coalescing operator:

$user= $context->userName() ?? 'guest';

Sometimes we want to perform an action if the value is null, and perform an alternative instead:

$user= $context->userName();
return null === $user ? null : strtoupper($user);

We already have a "standard" for chaining expressions with the pipe operator. The above without null handling would be:

return $context->userName() |> stroupper(...);

👉 To accomplish this, this feature request suggests a null-safe pipe operator, which would make the following an equivalent of the above:

return $context->userName() ?|> strtoupper(...);

This is consistent with the null-safe object operator. If we rewrote the above using a String class, we could have the following:

return $context->userName()?->toUpper();

However, wrapping every primitive string in a String instance would introduce quite a bit of runtime and development overhead!