Reuse your closures with functors

• difficult to reuse: if you want to reuse a closure or anonymous function in two different places, you'll have to share the creation code by putting it in a shared class or method. We have no separation between the creation code (which for an object would be a new operator and the code of the closure itself. It's a bit like eval().
• Difficult to force contracts on. You can't type hint a closure: even if a closure takes five arguments and another no arguments at all, you can't differentiate between them as parameters in a method signature.

function takesAsInputAnotherFunction(Closure $closure)

This hack is explicitly stated as an implementation detail which should not be relied upon in the PHP manual

__invoke() to the rescue

What if we wanted instead, a closure which we can instance even more than one time (maybe with different variables), and that we could type hint?
In this case, we need to return to the object-oriented paradigm by defining a class, and then use __invoke() to keep the syntactic sugar of being able to call it very simply:

$object($argument1, $argument2);$object($argument1, $argument2);

This kind of object is called a functor.

The definition of a class is longer than the creation code of a closure, so there is a trade-off: we have better specified code but we lose conciseness. Type hints are not only a defensive programming construct: they serve also as documentation as the next programmer reading a method's signature would learn what he can pass in just from the parameters hints instead of going reading the tests or grepping for the method in his working copy:

grep -r '->methodName(' .

becomes just a quick look at the definition

public function methodName(AdderCallback $callback) { // ...

However the expressing power of an object implementing __invoke() and of a closure are equivalent, and when you find yourself rewriting the same closure over and over, you may want to keep it in only one place. You'll have to create a class to hold the creation code anyway, so why not making it a class of its own?

For the PHP interpreter, closure and functors are really the same thing, and are even more swappable than callbacks built with array($object, 'methodName'). is_callable() returns true for both of them, and you can write $closure() as well as $functor().

Example

Here is some code that you can hack if you want to play with closures and functors.

<?php
$square = function($value) {
    return $value * $value;
};

var_dump($square(3));

/**
 * a little more noisy, but equivalent in usage and functionality-
 */
class SquareCallback
{
    public function __invoke($value)
    {
        return $value * $value;
    }
}

$squareObject = new SquareCallback;
var_dump($squareObject(3));

// using PHP utilities which works on callback: total equivalency
var_dump(is_callable($squareObject));

$array = array(0, 1, 2);
var_dump(array_map($square, $array));
var_dump(array_map($squareObject, $array));

// currying vs collaborators: total equivalency
$toAdd = 5;
$adder = function($value) use ($toAdd) {
    return $value + $toAdd;
};
var_dump($adder(3));

/**
 * A LOT more noisy
 */
class AdderCallback 
{
    private $numberToAdd;

    public function __construct($numberToAdd)
    {
        $this->numberToAdd = $numberToAdd;
    }

    public function __invoke($value)
    {
        return $value + $this->numberToAdd;
    }
};
$adder = new AdderCallback(5); 
var_dump($adder(3));

// but only classes can do this
function someMethodOrFunction(AdderCallback $adder)
{
    // ...
}