Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Duration class

Hi

Am 2026-06-22 19:37, schrieb Tim Düsterhus:
>> Oof. Naming.
>> The only term I can find that is specifically about dividing one 
>> duration by another is "beat", but that's definitely domain-specific.
>> 
>> 'periodCount' or 'countPeriods' come to mind. Since in 'n/d' we're 
>> counting how many times duration 'd' occurs during duration 'n' we're 
>> basically multiplying the duration by frequency '1/d'; the inverse of 
>> the frequency - 'd' itself - is called the period. Which word is also 
>> used for "named subdivision of historical time", "class-sized 
>> subdivision of a school day", and so on.
>> 
>> The biggest hangup with that name is that it doesn't explicitly state 
>> that it returns the remainder as well. periodParts? periodDivide?
> 
> Thank you for the suggestions. I quite like period. I'll also check 
> with Derick if he has any good ideas (and regarding the Duration 
> divided by Duration bit in general).

Derick mentioned how “period” might not be an ideal term, because it's 
something that the ISO standard moved away from. After having chatted 
with him about this, I would agree that it would possibly be confusing 
to mix “technical terminology” with “colloquial terminology” and might 
raise questions about what the difference between “Duration” (class 
name) and “Period” (method name) is when other languages call “Period” 
what we call “Duration”.

For `chunked…()` as suggested elsewhere in the thread, the implied 
return type would be `list<Duration>` (i.e. 
Duration::fromMinutes(50)->chunkedBy(Duration::fromMinutes(20)) === 
[Duration::fromMinutes(20), Duration::fromMinutes(20), 
Duration::fromMinutes(10)]`), since that would be consistent with 
`array_chunk()` and chunking in other programming languages.

Unless we come up with a genius idea, we might defer both divisions to 
later and ship PHP 8.6 with just addition, subtraction and 
multiplication - for that the question of add/sub vs sum() would still 
be open (see: https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/131504).

Best regards
Tim Düsterhus