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Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:28:56 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [VOTE] Property Accessors for 5.5
From: cryptocompress@googlemail.com (Crypto Compress)

Hello Clint, Nikita and Stas.

 > To facilitate complete functionality with properties it is necessary to
 > provide accessor functions to act on isset() and unset() calls.
 > Note: isset & unset implementations are always provided with default
 > implementations unless the author explicitly defines their own.

a) With magic methods we can make the accessed property inaccessible (as
properties may appear/disappear at runtime) and so we need some magic there
(__isset/__unset as of 5.1).
A property (accessors) is defined at design-time and may not become
inaccessible so the default implementation for isset/unset should be 
sufficient.

b) Result of (unset)$this->foo is always NULL.
If we provide a way to alter this "set(NULL)" behavior:
- it may fail before calling set(NULL)
- unset($this->foo); $this->foo !== (unset)$this->foo; // foo is not foo?

c) Logically isset/unset methods wrap up getter/setter at a higher level.
Maybe both methods are better suited for "operator 
overloading/overriding RFC"
where i would again expect some magic too.

I wonder what the functionality would be as someone have to override
isset/unset accessors. Do you have some examples?

cryptocompress

http://3v4l.org/NJWsW