a tasty tidbit to scratch an itch

One of my favorite perl constructs is the ability to put an if statement after a print statement:

print 'test' if($x == 2);

In php that becomes

if($x == 2) echo 'test';

Not strictly longer but the phrasing feels wrong.

Extending the chain class like so I can do this:

class Puts extends Chain{
  var $val;
  function __construct($val){
    parent::__construct();
    $this->val = $val;
  }

  function __if($condition){
    if($condition) echo $this->val."\n";
  }
}

function puts($string){
  $new = new Puts($string);
  return $new;
}

$x = 2;
puts('this is an assertion')->if($x == 2);

#this would be nice for debugging
puts('this is a debug message')->if(DEBUG);