It seems to me this would be a great option to add. How difficult would it be? Would it take significant editing of the source code? I don't see the issue in adding it - seems like it would have plenty of places to be used. Though, if it is added, the name 'readonly' seems a little misleading. It gives off the idea of being able to set it, and not edit again, and not only being able to edit it inside the class.
On 5/12/06, Hartmut Holzgraefe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Bastian Grupe wrote: > Blame my recent use of Java here ;-) > > Well, I think the whole point of ppp is to having to use setters and > getters consistently. i'm going to blame your use of Java for this one, ppp is way older than the setter/getter fashion and as far as i remember the main reason to introduce the setter/getter pattern into java was to have a standard way for Java IDEs to provide access to Java Bean properties in property dialogs in their GUI design tools > I personally wouldn't like to be able to access some members which are > private, and not others. It just *feels* wrong. Think of it as a more fine grained permission system, like unix file attributes. Reading and writing a property value are two different operations and it makes sense to distinguish access rights not only by ownership but also by type of operation. > And I don't know whether or not less typing is really a good argument in > this situation (think unreadable code in shortcut-ish programming > languages). Less typing is not an argument by itself, else we'd all do APL But less typing is less error prone (and no, plese *don't* mention auto-completion here ;), it can be less readable, too, and in this special case it spreads information that should be in one place. Maintainability can become an issue, too. Take a look at typical PHP class implementations: they have all properties on top followed by the member functions. So to find out whether a private property is really provite or whether it has a getter or even a setter, too, i would have to browse the full class code. class example { private $foo; private $bar; [... more properties ...] function __construct() {...} function __destruct() {...} function getFoo() {...} [... more code ...] } So $foo is readonly here and $bar is really private. Or wait, maybe we have just overlooked getBar()? With readonly $foo; on the other hand you have all the information in one place. If you want to go the getter/setter path all the way then we wouldn't need all the ppp stuff anymore alltogether, we would just make everything private and have the getter and setter decide (using instanceof on $this etc.) the access rights. -- Hartmut Holzgraefe, Senior Support Engineer . MySQL AB, www.mysql.com Are you certified? http://www.mysql.com/training/certification -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
-- ------------------------------------ Graham Christensen www.itrebal.com www.iamgraham.net