SchmancyOO provides some Lisp-inspired OO utilities that might make your life easier.

composer install bettrlife/schmancy-oo

A method combinator allows you to provide automatic method combinations. (A method combination is basically just a way of calling all the methods in the class hierarchy.)

As an example, imagine you have the following:

class A {
	function M() { return 1; }
}
class B extends A {}
class C extends B {
	function M() { return 2; }
}

A method combination using the function ‘+’ would invoke C->m(), then invoke A->m(), and add the results. To wit:

(new MethodCombinator(0, function ($x, $y) { $x + $y; }))
	->invoke('M', new C());
// => 3

Contrast that with PHP’s “standard” method combination where you would have to write something more like:

class A {
	function M() { return 1; }
}
class B extends A {}
class C extends B {
	function M() { return 2 + parent::M(); }
}

Which isn’t terribly onerous in this example, but is really annoying and error-prone as the combinator function gets more complicated or you start adding in traits-as-mixins.

Creates a new method combinator. Pass it an initial value, a combinator (callback), and (optionally) whether you’d like to include traits in the MRO.

Run a method combination against a class instance (or null, for static methods).

Shorthand for ->execute() where $class is the class of the instance.

Implements the C3 Linearization algorithm. While you are unlikely to use this directly, it’s the underpinnings of other things provided by this library, and is useful if you want to build your own utilities.

Given a class, returns an array of classes and traits defining the order in which methods should be tried (the “method resolution order”).