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Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:20:17 -0700
Message-ID: <CAFMT4NorkaT796eUzhqNGh5SKM9ny3F93M3vNEqg-qTPpAeHgw@mail.gmail.com>
To: Clint Priest <cpriest@zerocue.com>
Cc: Marco Pivetta <ocramius@gmail.com>, Sherif Ramadan <theanomaly.is@gmail.com>, 
	Anthony Ferrara <ircmaxell@gmail.com>, PHP Developers Mailing List <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [VOTE] Property Accessors for 5.5
From: morrison.levi@gmail.com (Levi Morrison)

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 2:07 PM, Clint Priest <cpriest@zerocue.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/23/2013 1:00 PM, Marco Pivetta wrote:
>>
>>
>> Actually, having the properties shown even if virtual allows us to access
>> them in a reflection-ish manner without doing dangerous assumptions like
>> "does the setter/getter exist"?
>>
>> The fact that the property is virtual is very useful, even though in
>> dumping it doesn't show any value. I don't see any radical difference in
>> debugging or ease of use in general.
>> Actually, doing the same things with magic getters/setters would probably
>> imply having to think more about the trace we want to follow when analyzing
>> our bugs. It is just a matter of being aware of new setter/getters (that are
>> anyway in our trace).
>>
>
> If you stop and think about it, the current accessors are identical in
> functionality to defining a private variable for every __get().
>
> So these two sets of code work and act identically:
>
> class Foo {
>   private $bar;
>   public __get($name) {
>     if($name == 'bar')
>       return $this->bar;
>   }
>   public __set($name, $value) {
>     if($name == 'bar')
>       $this->bar = $value;
>   }
>   public __isset($name) {
>     if($name == 'bar')
>       return isset($this->bar);
>   }
>   public __unset($name) {
>     if($name == 'bar')
>       unset($this->bar);
>   }
> }
>
> -- OR --
>
> class Foo {
>   public $bar { get; set; }
> }
>
> Except in the first case, you have to look at four sections of code to find
> "everything that applies to bar" and if you add 5 or 6 more dynamic
> properties, you have 4 huge switch statements, again with all the code split
> up everywhere.
>
> With Property Accessors, it's all right there.  This of course is a very
> simple case, if you actually USE the dynamic nature of __get(), etc then
> you've got a ton more code.

Let's not forget that all __get and __set would have save visibility
unless you manually controlled that which means more coding. Yay!