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To: Pierre-Alain Joye <paj@pearfr.org>
Cc: John Coggeshall <john@coggeshall.org>,
	George Schlossnagle <george@omniti.com>,
	PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Static weirdness..
From: hans@appliedsec.com (Hans Lellelid)

Hi -

Pierre-Alain Joye wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 12:23:04 -0500
> John Coggeshall <john@coggeshall.org> wrote:
> 
>>class foo {
>>	static function bar() {
>>	}
>>}
>>$a = new foo();
>>$a->bar(); /* Unacceptable and contradictory to the concept of static
>>*/ foo::bar(); /* Acceptable */
> 
> 
> I have the same problem as George :) I did not understand well your
> original post.
> 
> We are talking about the same thing. A notice (error sounds too
> drastic here) should be raised if a static method is called from the
> instanciated object.
> 

I disagree w/ any sort of error being raised by calling a static method 
from object context.  I think it should be allowed because

1) there is already the stuff in static to disallow any reference to 
$this, so there is no danger of a static method messing w/ instance 
variables. (i.e. if you're calling it by accident, you'll probably find 
out pretty quickly)

2) In some cases it is useful to instantiate an otherwise static class 
for the sake of passing it to some code that doesn't know the name of 
the static class.

For example in Propel (PHP5 Torque port) the "Peer" classes are static 
classes that do work on entities -- like inserting them in the database, 
etc.  If I have an array of Entity objects, I might want to get access 
to the Peer class that handles those entities, so I have:

foreach($entities as $ent) {
	$peer = $ent->getPeer(); // e.g. might be BookPeer
	$peer->doSelect(new Criteria()); //static: BookPeer::doSelect()
}

This [taken from Java Torque impl] is particularly useful because the 
alternative is having to invoke the method using call_user_func() or 
eval() (yuk!).

Hans