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Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2023 09:48:08 +0100
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To: Rowan Tommins <rowan.collins@gmail.com>
Cc: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: [RFC][Discussion] Harmonise "untyped" and "typed" properties
From: nicolas.grekas+php@gmail.com (Nicolas Grekas)

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Hi Rowan,

Le jeu. 23 nov. 2023 =C3=A0 08:56, Rowan Tommins <rowan.collins@gmail.com> =
a
=C3=A9crit :

> On 23 November 2023 01:37:06 GMT, Claude Pache <claude.pache@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >What you describe in the last sentence is what was initially designed an=
d
> implemented by the RFC: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/typed_properties_v2
> (section Overloaded Properties).
> >
> >However, it was later changed to the current semantics (unset() needed i=
n
> order to trigger __get()) in https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/4974
>
>
> Good find. So not only is it not specified this way in the RFC, it
> actually made it into a live release, then someone complained and we rush=
ed
> out a more complicated version "to avoid WTF". That's really unfortunate.
>
> I'm not at all convinced by the argument in the linked bug report -
> whether you get an error or an unexpected call to __get, the solution is =
to
> assign a valid value to the property. And making the behaviour different
> after unset() just hides the user's problem, which is that they didn't
> expect to *ever* have a call to __get for that property.
>
> But I guess I'm 4 years too late to make that case
>

Sorry this comes as a surprise to you but you're rewriting history here.
The current behavior, the one that was fixed in that commit, matches how
PHP behaved before typed properties, so this commit brought consistency.

About the behavior, it's been in use for many years to build lazy proxies.
I know two major use cases that leverage this powerful capability: Doctrine
entities and Symfony lazy services. There are more as any code that
leverages ocramius/proxy-manager relies on this.

About the vocabulary, the source tells us that "uninitialized" properties
that are unset() become "undefined". I know that's not super accurate since
a typed property is always defined semantically, but that's nonetheless the
flag that is used in the source. Maybe this could help with the RFC.

Cheers,
Nicolas

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