Hello,
PHP implements many features, and skips many features. I think the
rule of thumb needs to be that if a feature is implemented, finish
it.
For example, if you provide __get() and __set(), provide an
efficient way of handling the normal use case.
If you start triggering an E_NOTICE when an undefined variable is
accessed, then provide an easy way to access variables that may or
may not be set.
If you provide a __tostring() method, then finish it so that is gets
called when an object is cast to a string, concatenated with a
string, as well as being output with echo, print.
There are a lot of casual users of PHP. There are also the people
out there who are buying the Zend products, buying the MySQL support
contracts, using PHP at Yahoo! -- the people who have chosen to use
PHP OVER Java/.NET/Perl, because it is a great language -- the
people who need the completed features because they are running
multi-million-dollar businesses on this platform.
Take a step back and truly evaluate why someone in a demanding
situation might want every bit of performance and readability that
they can squeeze out of *existing* language features.
I'm not talking about adding hundreds of new features, or turning
PHP into the next java. It's about real business cases.
It's not about what YOU WOULD NOT use, it's about what a lot of
people need.
--
Best regards,
Jason Garber mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
IonZoft, Inc.
Friday, May 12, 2006, 3:16:27 PM, you wrote:
igc> It seems to me this would be a great option to add. How
difficult would it
igc> be? Would it take significant editing of the source code? I
don't see the
igc> issue in adding it - seems like it would have plenty of places
to be used.
igc> Though, if it is added, the name 'readonly' seems a little
misleading. It
igc> gives off the idea of being able to set it, and not edit again,
and not only
igc> being able to edit it inside the class.
igc> 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
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>>
>>
