+1

Another request for anonymous classes. Without support for anonymous classes, it can sometimes be necessary to create hundreds of named, and rarely used, classes. Anonymous classes are often used for quick instances that are created and destroyed quickly, so a performance hit is reasonable.

The benefits of anonymous classes are twofold:

a) efficiency of code
b) efficiency of use of resources

consider:

$Div = new DivElement($InnerHTML = 'hello');
$Div->display();

versus:

(new DivElement( $InnerHTML = 'hello'))->display();

Lines of unnecessary code are saved, plus memory is allocated more efficiently.

This is especially useful for objects that merely appear for a single purpose and then vanish.

David,  I do not believe you are understanding the request here.

I believe this is more what is being requested.

class Base {
   private $name;
   public function __construct($name) {
      $this->name = $name;
   }
   public function test() {
      return $this->name;
   }
}

$obj = new class extends Base {
     public function test() {
        return '<'.$this->name.'>';
     }
};

echo $obj->test();

Basically similar to that of anonymous functions introduced in PHP 5.3

Would be nice to have this in Php 5.4 (or a latter version)

+1

Not exactly the same but look at closure and traits support in 5.4.

+1

Anonymous classes in Java are convenient when used with Interfaces. In PHP, this 
could help with MVC frameworks. Say all pages had a class that implemented 
PageController:
[some_page.php]
$page_controller = new PageInterface() {
  function doGet() {}
  function doPost() {}
};

A current workaround would be using a factory or constructor to which you pass 
required methods, and not using an interface. It works, but then you have to 
deal with missing methods in application logic where you could otherwise just 
handle an error.

My guess is that anonymous classes would have a good chance once a good implementation comes by. This is not completely trivial as the class_entry has to be stored in the class_table but has to be somewhat hidden and we might have to find a way to hide the information in the oparray.

As all things in PHP this needs a volunteer to do it. All contributors have sometime X to work on PHP and in time X can either discuss stuff, fix bugs or implement features ... but with some guidance this might be a nice project for a newcomer (I'd volunteer to give a hand to point in the right direction etc., while  this guarantees acceptance in no way as that would need an RFC etc.) until then we have to live with workarounds.

For the PageController interface example an (work-around) alternative is

$page_controller = [
  'get'  => function () {},
  'post' => function () {}
};

http://wiki.php.net/rfc/anonymous_classes

anonymous_classes was declined.

http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.anonymous.php happened! Thanks!