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Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2017 20:34:20 -0400
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Subject: [RFC] [Discussion] Class Friendship in PHP
From: mdwheele@ncsu.edu (Dustin Wheeler)

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Hi!

Almost two years ago, I opened discussion regarding my proposal to support
class friendship through a new keyword, `friend`. For a number of reasons
(mostly work-related; some personal) I didn't have time to move the process
forward. There were several hot-topic discussions going through the mailing
list at the time that I believed deserved more attention. I feel that my
RFC was ill-timed, perhaps. That said, we're almost two years into the
future!

I would like to re-open discussion of my RFC and get it to vote
appropriately soon.

In the previous discussion, there was on-going work to introduce
package-private classes by Guilherme. As far as I can tell that work is
stalled, pending fundamental changes to how namespaces are implemented in
PHP (https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/947#issuecomment-224912697). Like
many others, I am very excited for the possibility of package-private
classes or namespace visibility features of any kind. Even so, my personal
vision of that landscape includes class friendship as a unique, explicit
and concise expression of tight-coupling between object-oriented
collaborators. I do not feel these efforts are either-or. I believe they
both contribute to a more expressive means of specifying the relationship
between collaborators with regard to visibility.

The RFC is at:

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/friend-classes

I need to rebase my implementation against `master` and send a PR. I will
have that done before voting begins as it includes several test cases and I
would appreciate additional perspectives to catch edge-cases I may not have
thought of. The implementation was quite straight-forward.

Thanks!

-- 
Dustin Wheeler | Software Developer
NC State University
mdwheele@ncsu.edu
"If you don't know where you're going, it's easy to iteratively not get
there."

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