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Date: Fri, 12 May 2006 14:06:56 -0700
To: Jason Garber <jason@ionzoft.com>,itrebal@gmail.com
Cc: "Hartmut Holzgraefe" <hartmut@php.net>,
	"Bastian Grupe" <bgrupe@gmail.com>,<internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] private, protected, readonly, public
From: andi@zend.com (Andi Gutmans)

I can take any feature in PHP and add features :)

At 01:44 PM 5/12/2006, Jason Garber wrote:
>Hello,
>
>   PHP implements many features, and skips many features.  I think the
>   rule of thumb needs to be that if a feature is implemented, finish
>   it.
>
>   For example, if you provide __get() and __set(), provide an
>   efficient way of handling the normal use case.
>
>   If you start triggering an E_NOTICE when an undefined variable is
>   accessed, then provide an easy way to access variables that may or
>   may not be set.
>
>   If you provide a __tostring() method, then finish it so that is gets
>   called when an object is cast to a string, concatenated with a
>   string, as well as being output with echo, print.
>
>   There are a lot of casual users of PHP.  There are also the people
>   out there who are buying the Zend products, buying the MySQL support
>   contracts, using PHP at Yahoo! -- the people who have chosen to use
>   PHP OVER Java/.NET/Perl, because it is a great language -- the
>   people who need the completed features because they are running
>   multi-million-dollar businesses on this platform.
>
>
>   Take a step back and truly evaluate why someone in a demanding
>   situation might want every bit of performance and readability that
>   they can squeeze out of *existing* language features.
>
>   I'm not talking about adding hundreds of new features, or turning
>   PHP into the next java.  It's about real business cases.
>
>   It's not about what YOU WOULD NOT use, it's about what a lot of
>   people need.
>
>--
>Best regards,
>  Jason Garber                           mailto:jason@ionzoft.com
>  IonZoft, Inc.
>
>Friday, May 12, 2006, 3:16:27 PM, you wrote:
>
>igc> It seems to me this would be a great option to add. How 
>difficult would it
>igc> be? Would it take significant editing of the source code? I don't see the
>igc> issue in adding it - seems like it would have plenty of places 
>to be used.
>igc> Though, if it is added, the name 'readonly' seems a little misleading. It
>igc> gives off the idea of being able to set it, and not edit again, 
>and not only
>igc> being able to edit it inside the class.
>
>igc> On 5/12/06, Hartmut Holzgraefe <hartmut@php.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> Bastian Grupe wrote:
> >> > Blame my recent use of Java here ;-)
> >> >
> >> > Well, I think the whole point of ppp is to having to use setters and
> >> > getters consistently.
> >>
> >> i'm going to blame your use of Java for this one, ppp is way older
> >> than the setter/getter fashion and as far as i remember the main
> >> reason to introduce the setter/getter pattern into java was to
> >> have a standard way for Java IDEs to provide access to Java Bean
> >> properties in property dialogs in their GUI design tools
> >>
> >> > I personally wouldn't like to be able to access some members which are
> >> > private, and not others. It just *feels* wrong.
> >>
> >> Think of it as a more fine grained permission system, like unix
> >> file attributes. Reading and writing a property value are two
> >> different operations and it makes sense to distinguish access
> >> rights not only by ownership but also by type of operation.
> >>
> >> > And I don't know whether or not less typing is really a good argument in
> >> > this situation (think unreadable code in shortcut-ish programming
> >> > languages).
> >>
> >> Less typing is not an argument by itself, else we'd all do APL
> >>
> >> But less typing is less error prone (and no, plese *don't* mention
> >> auto-completion here ;), it can be less readable, too, and in this
> >> special case it spreads information that should be in one place.
> >> Maintainability can become an issue, too.
> >>
> >> Take a look at typical PHP class implementations: they have
> >> all properties on top followed by the member functions. So to find
> >> out whether a private property is really provite or whether it has
> >> a getter or even a setter, too, i would have to browse the full
> >> class code.
> >>
> >>    class example {
> >>      private $foo;
> >>      private $bar;
> >>      [... more properties ...]
> >>
> >>      function __construct() {...}
> >>      function __destruct() {...}
> >>
> >>      function getFoo() {...}
> >>
> >>      [... more code ...]
> >>    }
> >>
> >> So $foo is readonly here and $bar is really private. Or wait,
> >> maybe we have just overlooked getBar()?
> >>
> >> With
> >>
> >>    readonly $foo;
> >>
> >> on the other hand you have all the information in one place.
> >>
> >> If you want to go the getter/setter path all the way then we
> >> wouldn't need all the ppp stuff anymore alltogether, we would
> >> just make everything private and have the getter and setter
> >> decide (using instanceof on $this etc.) the access rights.
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Hartmut Holzgraefe, Senior Support Engineer                            .
> >> MySQL AB, www.mysql.com
> >>
> >> Are you certified? http://www.mysql.com/training/certification
> >>
> >> --
> >> PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List
> >> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
> >>
> >>