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Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060515210559.06acd350@zend.com>
Date: Mon, 15 May 2006 21:15:50 +0300
To: Jason Garber <jason@ionzoft.com>
Cc: internals@lists.php.net
In-Reply-To: <785810036.20060511193536@ionzoft.com>
References: <785810036.20060511193536@ionzoft.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] private, protected, readonly, public
From: zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski)

I have to say that in second thought (after realizing what you really 
meant) it sounds like a very useful feature.

The main thing that worries me is the complexity to the end user, 
which is already in a pretty bad shape as it is today, and many 
people here care very little about it, because they can't relate to 
beginners and average developers.  Private/protected/public is a 
challenge to many of them (not the theory, real world situations), 
doubling complexity with a modifier is not a good idea.

In order to push complexity down I'd avoid making this yet another 
modifier, and in fact make this an access level, on par with 
private/protected/public, that would behave like public, except for 
when outside the object scope (i.e., have it between protected and 
public).  One of the trickey things would be finding an acceptable 
name, since 'readonly' implies something which this variable isn't 
(it's very much writable, from the right places).  Maybe something 
like 'visible' (of course preferably we need to find something that 
begins with 'p'...)

Zeev

At 02:35 12/05/2006, Jason Garber wrote:
>Hello internals,
>
>   __get() and __set() are great, but 90% of the time, I find myself
>   using them to create public readonly properties.
>
>   The only problem with this is it is horridly inefficient, consuming
>   at least 1 function call and one switch statement (or equiv) per
>   property read.
>
>   Would it be possible to create a new object property attribute:
>     readonly
>
>   class xx
>   {
>      readonly $bar;
>   }
>
>   $o = new xx();
>
>   $o->bar = 10;
>   >>> FATAL ERROR
>
>
>   This way, PHP would allow reading (as if it were public), but only
>   allow writing from within the class.
>
>   I think it could really boost performance of complicated application
>   logic that wishes to enforce good visibility.
>
>   Comments?
>
>   PS. What brought this up was some serious performance issues in a
>   piece of code that I am working with - most of which can be tied
>   back to __get() performance.
>
>--
>Best regards,
>  Jason Garber                      mailto:jason@ionzoft.com
>  IonZoft, Inc.
>
>--
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