Adding/removing properties at runtime is great if you want obscure, unmaintainable code and don't think an IDE is useful.
So to make my previous statement more precise, dynamic properties are not widely used in respectable modern codebases, and is generally something a reputable developer would frown upon. Yes, some codebases (e.g. Drupal) rely on this extensively, but modern frameworks generally do not - in fact, they often take measures to ensure that exceptions are thrown if you try to access a property that has not been formally defined. For that matter, most ORMs (a typical example of where dynamic properties would come in handy) don't rely on dynamic properties either - they rely on __get() and __set() and store the actual values in a single property, as an array. So even for highly dynamic components in modern frameworks, this is not a feature that is often used. Drupal-development aside, and perhaps some XOOPS-development back in the dark ages, I can't actually recall when I've used dynamic properties. I suddenly realize why certain heavily-used classes in the Yii framework have obscure property-names like $_m and $_p ... they're trying to save memory. Not really logical that you should have to compromise legible code in favor of saving memory. Makes me wonder if this issue could be addressed, killing two birds with one stone. Since the dynamic aspect is an inconvenience to many developers, and since it causes memory-overhead whether they make use of this feature or not, how about introducing a non-dynamic alternative base-class that actually throws if you access properties that have not been defined? This wouldn't change the way PHP objects work by default, but would lighten the memory-overhead in a lot of modern frameworks, and possibly speed up property-access too, since you can have a flat look-up table for class-properties; and could eliminate the need for an "object" or "component" base-class in frameworks... On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 2:55 PM, Stas Malyshev <smalys...@sugarcrm.com> wrote: > Hi! > >> How come it's necessary to store the property-names of every property >> in every object? For properties that have been defined in classes, why >> can't they be stored in a more efficient manner? (using lookup tables) > > No because you can add and remove properties freely at runtime. > >> I know the nature of PHP is dynamic, and I know that dynamic >> properties would have to be stored in a key/value form internally... >> but if you look at modern PHP software, dynamic properties is actually >> something very few people use. > > This is not true. -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
