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Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:47:21 +0100
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To: Peter Lind <peter.e.lind@gmail.com>, internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Assign array with __get
From: mathieu.suen@easyflirt.com ("mathieu.suen")

Peter Lind wrote:
>
> On the contrary, it's quite obvious what's going on. In both examples
> __get() returns an array as PHP would normally do it (i.e. NOT by
> reference) which means that if you try to modify that you'll end up
> modifying nothing much. However, in your second example, the point at
> which you call __get() indirectly comes before the assign to the zork
> array - hence, the $this->zork['blah'] = 'blah'; no longer indirectly
> calls __get as object::$zork now exists.
>
>  In other words, this is down to you confusing passing a variable by
> reference and passing it by value: PHP normally passes arrays by
> value, so when __get() returns an array, you're working on a copy of
> the array you returned. As someone noted earlier, you can easily
> change the behaviour of __get to return variables by reference, should
> you want to. However, I personally wouldn't want this to be default
> behaviour as that would make debugging apps much more annoying -
> things should be consistent, even if consistency at times confuse
> people.
>
> Regards
> Peter
>
>   

The sementic of

$this->zork

Should be the same as

$this->__get('zork')

So in that respect it is not consistent.

But anywhere I don't care if  it change or not.

Look at Scheme, Lisp and Smalltalk language.
This is what I call consistent language.


-- Mathieu Suen