Juozas Kaziukenas has a new post to his Web Species blog about using "lazy evaluation" in PHP - loading the resources you need for execution and evaluation only as you need them, not all up front.

Recently I needed to process a huge array of data and because of PHP's somewhat inefficient variables and especially arrays that was resulting in "out of memory" errors. However, I couldn't use any other tools than PHP so was forced to come up with a solution implementation in it. Here is how I solved it using principles from functional languages.

He gives an example using Haskell to generate a Fibonacci sequence using its built-in lazy evaluation abilities. Unfortunately, PHP doesn't have such a thing built in, so he tries the next best thing - Iterators. He caries the idea over to the database side too, recommending fetch() in a loop over fetchAll() and some effective joins.

Andrei Zmievski has posted something new to his blog today about a feature of PHP6 that's finally been hammered down - HTTP input (request) decoding.

There have been no fewer than 4 different proposals floated before, but this one combines flexibility, performance, intuitiveness, and minimal architectural changes, and has only a couple of small drawbacks. Let's take a closer look.

He details the functionality - what it is, what's been decided on, and the advantages of the method. The basic approach is a "lazy" one where PHP will only store the request when it comes in, no filtering or anything, until you want to do something with it (i.e. get it via $_GET, $_POST, etc). When the request for data is made, PHP looks at the encoding settings and formats the data accordingly.

Advantages he mentions for this method include removing the guess-work on PHP's part for which encoding the request is and that it removes some of the overhead by not processing the data until it's actually needed.