Re: Class constants

Marcus Bointon wrote:

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but it seems you can't use class constants to set default values for class properties. You can, however, use them for default values for method params, e.g.: class foo {}

             ^--- er.

const BAR = 100; private $thing = self::BAR; function wibble($a = self::BAR) {

    echo $a;

} }

class foo { const BAR = 100; private $thing = self::BAR; function wibble($a = self::BAR) {

    echo $a;

} } $f = new foo; $f->wibble(); it _seems_ you did not test this, at least when I run this it gives me a fatal error (which definitely leaves $this->thing undefined!)

In this case $this->thing will be undefined, but wibble() will get the correct default value for $a. Comments?

I believe this is due to the fact that when setting up $thing, php is still building the class definition therefore the constant does not 'exist' yet. the error msg I get seems to confirm this. this does work: class qux { const BAR = 100; } class foo { const BAR = 100; private $thing = qux::BAR; function wibble($a = self::BAR) {

    echo $a,"\n",$this->thing;

} } $f = new foo; $f->wibble(); this does work, which really surprised me. class foo { const BAR = 100; private $thing = foo::BAR; function wibble($a = self::BAR) {

    echo $a,"\n",$this->thing;

} } $f = new foo; $f->wibble(); but honestly if you want to be very stricly correct about you OO then you should not (I believe) be setting a value to an instance member in the class definition, instead do: class foo { const BAR = 100; function __construct() {

    $this->thing = self::BAR;

} function wibble($a = self::BAR) {

    echo $a,"\n",$this->thing;

} } $f = new foo; $f->wibble(); I tested all this on PHP 5.0.2 (cli) (built: Oct 21 2004 13:52:27)

Marcus