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Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:34:39 -0700
Message-ID: <CADajX4A_mhJoMoDtG=SH9UPqcXUxN0i3EfKkSWn27fJDUGWP_g@mail.gmail.com>
To: Rasmus Schultz <rasmus@mindplay.dk>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] property de-referencing
From: aharvey@php.net (Adam Harvey)

On 30 April 2013 16:15, Rasmus Schultz <rasmus@mindplay.dk> wrote:
> At the risk of starting a separate discussion, the recently added
> ClassName::class constant provides a way to statically reference a class,
> which frankly has very few practical applications in comparison - the need
> to reference properties is usually much more prevalent and repetitive than
> the need to reference a class; assuming your classes have more than one
> property each, heh. The feature as such is also somewhat crippled, since
> what comes out of it is a string and not a class-reference.

I would caution against generalising use cases. Personally, ::class is
something I can use multiple times a day. This I'm not so sure about.

Your use case is not my use case, and vice versa. :)

> I think there is still a pretty strong case for static property-references,
> but since any new language-feature is generally a pretty hard sell around
> here, I'm letting this one go for now.

Why does this have to be a language feature? It obviously already
works in userland, as your own Symfony 2 examples show. One could
write a PropertyReference class right now with literally the only
difference being the lack of a builtin operator (ie new
PropertyReference($obj, 'prop') versus ^$obj->prop): the fact that
nobody seems to have done this in a major framework I know of suggests
that there isn't a strong need for encapsulating the indirection
beyond the $obj->$prop syntax that's worked forever.

Adam