[RFC] Auto-generated dictionary using constants

[Nek-]

We often use constants in dictionary that needs to be set in the constructor, why not having a class that detect constants and use them as keys & values for dictionary ?

Example:

class AwesomeDictionary extends ConstantDictionary
{
    public const MY_VALUE_1 = 'key';
    public const MY_VALUE_2 = 'key2';
    public const MY_VALUE_3 = 'key3';
}
/*
Generates dictionary
[
    'key' => 'MY_VALUE_1',
    'key2' => 'MY_VALUE_2',
    'key3' => 'MY_VALUE_3',
]
*/

What do you think?

[melicerte]

Can you elaborate on the use case ? It's not that clear to me.

[Nek-]

We often define dictionary the following way:

class NotSoAwesomeDictionary extends SimpleDictionary
{
    public const MY_VALUE_1 = 'key';
    public const MY_VALUE_2 = 'key2';
    public const MY_VALUE_3 = 'key3';

    public function __construct()
    {
         parent::__construct([
            self::MY_VALUE_1 => 'MY_VALUE_1',
            self::MY_VALUE_2 => 'MY_VALUE_2',
            self::MY_VALUE_3 => 'MY_VALUE_3',
        ]);
    }
}

Which doesn't really looks awesome.

But that's not entirely true. It looks in many cases more like:

class NotSoAwesomeDictionary extends SimpleDictionary
{
    public const MY_VALUE_1 = 'key';
    public const MY_VALUE_2 = 'key2';
    public const MY_VALUE_3 = 'key3';

    public function __construct()
    {
         parent::__construct([
            self::MY_VALUE_1 => 'human readable label 1',
            self::MY_VALUE_2 => 'human readable label 2',
            self::MY_VALUE_3 => 'human readable label 3',
        ]);
    }
}

The problem with this approach is that it's not translatable, which is why the first example still makes sense.

[melicerte]

I see your point. It would be sort of a shortcut instead of using well configured calleable dictionary. Let's do this :)