Re: PHP 5 Question about OO

Richard Lynch wrote:

On Wed, June 1, 2005 3:53 am, Marcus Bointon said:

On 1 Jun 2005, at 11:38, Jochem Maas wrote:

all true, now imagine that you install a couple of 3rdparty php5 'packages' and they all define __autoload() - ain't gonna work! which is why there has been discussion on internals regarding the possibility of use a handler- function stack for autoloading (in the same way that you can register a stack of input/output filter-function)... something to keep an eye on in case things change :-)

I've run into this one. One way that would work for me (and initially it's how I assumed it worked) is for __autoload to be a standard class method like __construct, so that a class would attempt to run its own autoloader before breaking out to the global function namespace.

Maybe I'm being dumb, but how can an object's __autoload function get called when the object class definition hasn't been loaded, and that's why you're calling __autoload in the first place... That seems like classic chicken/egg situation to me...

that was my first reaction, but then I thought what if the __autoload() function was called when 'any' class needed to be included while running code inside said class... that _might_ actually be useful at any rate the __autoload() issue is still very much undecided :-)

It's also incredibly likely that __autoload's being "stacked" won't work out too well. Consider this: foo software defines an __autoload Some foo_* classes get defined, autoloaded, everybody's happy. bar software defines an __autoload Some bar_* classes get defined, autoloaded, everybody's happy. Now some foo_* classes try to get instantiated, for whateve reason. bar's __autoload function is gonna kick, and that ain't good for foo_* Seems to me you'd need an array of regular expressions and the function to call: array('foo_*'=>'foo__autoload', 'bar_*'=>'bar__autoload') if you wanted to allow multiple __autoload functions to exist... I'm sure there are other ideas/solutions floating around, but that's A possibility. For performance, maybe just use stristr and 'foo_' instead of RegEx and 'foo_*' [shrug]