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Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 09:17:08 +0200
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Subject: RFC: Automatic Property Initialization
From: gooh@php.net (Gordon Oheim)


Independent but related to

- https://wiki.php.net/rfc/constructor-promotion

I wrote an RFC about porting Dart-like Automatic Property Initialization 
to PHP. Nikic was so generous to provide an initial PoC for it (since I 
don't do C):

- https://wiki.php.net/rfc/automatic_property_initialization
- https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/474

I am proposing this for inclusion in 5.6.
There is no BC breaks afaik.

The RFC suggests to allow for $this->foo as Constructor arguments to 
make the boilerplate code for property assignments in constructors 
superfluous. This is the core feature subject to discussion.

I've spoken to about two dozen developers outside internals prior to 
suggesting this RFC and the general response was positive and the core 
feature unanimously deemed useful. Moreover, in the previous discussion 
about constructor promotion there was some messages suggesting that the 
now proposed syntactic approach is more preferred than using visibility 
keywords.

The RFC also suggests some related syntactic sugar like Methodless 
Constructors, an alternate and shorter syntax, as well as making this 
available in the entire class scope. These are things I am not sure of 
so I am hoping for comments on these. Should this RFC get into the 
voting phase, we should by then have either promoted or eliminated these 
options through discussion.

Thanks and Regards, Gordon