Hi Mike,
Missed your e-mail because it went to the list only.
What you're demonstrating here is functionally equivalent to the simple
example I provided. (The example was intended to show how this feature
works, not necessarily how you would use it in practice.)
The key difference, is that a native reference carries no contextual
information with it - a form-helper for instance can't determine which
object the referenced property belongs to, the name of the property, or
even the fact that the variable is referencing an object-property in the
first place.
You also can't use the & operator to create a reference to a virtual
(__get/__set) property, because you would be creating a reference to the
value that is returned by the __get() method, rather than to a (virtual)
property of an object.
That's why form-helpers currently store references to objects, and
reference properties using strings - rather than using native
variable-references as in your example.
---
From: "Ford, Mike" <m.f...@leedsmet.ac.uk>
To: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Cc:
Date: Wed, 1 May 2013 13:20:32 +0000
Subject: RE: [PHP-DEV] property de-referencing
I know I'm still somewhat of a beginner with OOP, and not at all into
large-scale OOP frameworks (yet!), but I'm really struggling to understand
why the existing & reference operator doesn't suffice for what you are
after?
If you could explain in words of as few syllables as possible what you
would want to add to:
class User
{
public $name;
}
$user = new User;
$user->name = 'Rasmus';
$nameprop = &$user->name;
var_dump($nameprop); // => 'Rasmus'
$nameprop = 'Bob';
var_dump($nameprop); // => 'Bob'
I would be immensely grateful, as I might then stand a chance of deciding
whether I'm with you or agin you...!
Cheers!
Mike
