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Porting the best of the Ruby Standard Library to PHP 5.3.

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Copyright(c) 2010 by Dina-Marie Abad Lolich
dlolich@modron.net

this code is licensed under the "don't be a retarded asshole" license.
if i don't like how you use this software i can tell you to fuck off
and you can't use it, otherwise you can use it.

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You need to have PHP 5.3 built and installed on your system for this code to
be of any use. Not very many distributions are offering PHP 5.3 right now so
you should probably download it directly from PHP.net.

My motivation for writing this code is not because I find it useful, but because
I believe the reason why many web-BROgrammers are choosing Ruby is not due to
the language, but due to the more robust standard library that it comes with, but
they dont fully realize this fact. The standard library is heavily driven around
blocks in a closure-passing style since iterators like each and map are methods
on objects instead of language constructs. PHP 5.3 has made much headway in the
way of language constructs such as anonymous functions, namespaces and late static
binding (although still without operator overloading).

Ruby programmers seem to be a bit over-zealous about commending their language
of choice, but PHP isnt doing much in the way of defending itself (via its users)
and so I would like to offer this library up as a way of demonstrating the merits
of PHP 5.3. It is still a work in progress, and there are definately some serious
hurdles to overcome, particularly the native types in PHP and the inability to
call object properties assigned to anonymous functions in a nice way due to the
sytax afforded by php. Its the many small things PHP forgot to handle which
makes such an endeavor such as porting the Ruby standard library a difficult task.
The large bulk of the task was otherwise simple.

Some of the language constructs in Ruby, such as mixins, are nearly impossible to
acheive without designing a relatively contrived alternative prototypical object
model based purely on anonymous functions and object properties. Had PHP simply
made a few different decisions this might have been an easy reality to manifest.

Current handling and sheperding of numeric types is sort of a cluster-fuck but
will improve once a paradigm is settled upon. Strings and Arrays seem to be working
pretty decently. The general idea is to have a fully hierarchical object model
derived from the Object class but the functor between native types and class
types is not fully solidified. Please be patient.

Please refer to test.php to see code examples. 

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