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Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2013 08:45:25 -0500
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To: Clint Priest <cpriest@zerocue.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [VOTE] Property Accessors for 5.5
From: theanomaly.is@gmail.com (Sherif Ramadan)

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On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Clint Priest <cpriest@zerocue.com> wrote:

>
> On 1/17/2013 12:20 PM, Clint Priest wrote:
>
>> I'm happy to say that Property Accessors is ready for a vote for
>> inclusion in 5.5 release.
>>
>> Nikita and I (as well as Stas a bit) have all been working hard to make
>> this happen for 5.5, voting and the specifications are here:
>>
>> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/**propertygetsetsyntax-v1.2#**voting<https://wiki.php.net/rfc/propertygetsetsyntax-v1.2#voting>
>>
>>
> For those that have voted against this proposal, are there any
> clarifications that can be made or questions answered?
>
> There seems to be a lot of userland support for this proposal from people
> who don't have voting rights.
>
>
>

I just wanted to add my two cents here on top of what has already been
mentioned about added complexity with minimal benefit (which I mostly agree
with).

For me, the proposal sounded intriguing from the start, but I noticed a lot
of discussion around this RFC early on. This led me to believe that it was
going to be a popular feature, which I believe it is. Unfortunately, the
discussion seemed to grow so quickly that I could not find the time to
follow it all. The discussion also seemed to be torn into a hundred
different directions at once. Mostly just the regular internals noise that
I'm used to, but with a few moments of confusion on implementation.

I didn't really get it when it was being discussed. I was actually kind of
confused about what exactly was being proposed and I saw lots of changes in
the RFC and then the newly added RFC that was supposed to be a compliment
to this one. After seeing the patch and getting a chance to test it out,
though, I realized that the feature seems really confusing in terms of
behavior. It felt like a lot was being added, but in reality it was just a
lot of code complexity, not a lot of functionality.

Don't get me wrong, I liked it, but I also disliked the fact that it
introduces language changes that aren't easy to grasp or document. To me
this means we've borderline changed the behavior of a property (which most
PHP users currently understand to be a variable) into potential methods.
This is basically saying we can now completely change the behavior of a
property from a storage unit to a functional unit. That's a bit of a scary
thought to me, because it makes me question everything I know about
properties in PHP.

I think you did a wonderful job on this RFC and the code, as well as
everyone involved. Clearly, there is a demand for this. However, I'm not
sure I would feel comfortable seeing the after effects of this feature in
PHP. For what it's worth, this was not an easy vote for me. I debated it
for several days before I made my decision and I tried to be as objective
as possible. I just couldn't bring myself to vote it in for 5.5.



> --
> -Clint
>
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