Functional elements to work with aggregations

A common pattern in PHP is iterating through a list of objects and executing certain methods of the objects. This is especially common when it comes to 1:n-relations (e.g. one object, n adapters). This proposal is meant to abstract those iterations in convenient functional constructs by adding method call iterators and iterator functions.

foreach ($list as $element) {
    $element->method();
}

$result = array();
foreach ($list as $element) {
    $result[] = $element->method();
}

foreach ($list as $element) {
    if ($element->conditionalMethod()) {
        $element->method();
    }
}

$result = array();
foreach ($list as $element) {
    if ($element->conditionalMethod()) {
        $result[] = $element->method();
    }
}

Extracting the required functionality to leads to the following required additions:

• class CallIterator: a simple iterator which walks over a traversable list (including arrays) and calls a specified method. The CallIterator might optionally gather the results
• function is_traversable(): Returns true if a list is traversable (Iterator/IteratorAggregate/array)
• function iterate(): Walks over a traversable list and does nothing
• function iterator_true(): Walks over a traversable list and assumes every element to be bool(true)
• function iterator_false(): Walks over a traversable list and assumes every element to be bool(false)

iterate(new CallIterator($list, 'method'));

$result = iterate(new CallIterator($list, 'method'), true);