Hi: Traits do not provide any special provisioning for handling properties, especially, there is no language solution for handling colliding property names. The current solution/idiom for handling state safely in a trait is to use either abstract set/get methods or an abstract get that returns a reference to the property in the class.
However, at the moment it is possible to define properties in a trait: trait Foo { private $a; public $foo; } For the moment, that information is completely ignored, thus: class Bar { use Foo; } property_exists('Bar', 'a') === false Well, and that is a rather inconsistent status-quo. I would like to have that fixed in one or another way. One possibility would be to forbid property definition in a trait altogether. That reduces a bit the possibility to have wrong expectations about properties, however, the dynamic property creation is still possible. Another way would be to merge the properties in the composing class. The question here would be how to treat visibility modifiers: how to merge public and private, should it result in public, or private? And, to discorage users to go this way, should there be a STRICT notice? Options here are a notice whenever a property is defined in a trait, or whenever properties are silently merged. Comments very welcome. Thanks Stefan -- Stefan Marr Software Languages Lab Vrije Universiteit Brussel Pleinlaan 2 / B-1050 Brussels / Belgium http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smarr Phone: +32 2 629 2974 Fax: +32 2 629 3525 -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php