Re: Fatal error: Cannot re-assign $this -- any plans to "fix" this limitation?

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 5:53 PM, Daevid Vincent <daevid@daevid.com> wrote: > Are there any plans to fix this "bug" (or add this as a feature depending > on > your POV) > > I have a connection class that uses singletons for each database. We have > replication on our PROD boxes but on our VMs we don't, so the code does a > little magic to determine if it's an INSERT|UPDATE|DELETE|REPLACE and tries > to change to the proper mysql connection (write to master, read from slaves > in the case of PROD and just use the same DB on the VM). > > The problem, and it's quite frustrating considering it doesn't make a lot > of > logical sense why you couldn't do it, is that PHP doesn't allow the > re-assignment of $this. :-\ > > Both of these fail (of course) > > $this = Connection::get_instance(self::_determine_RDBMS($mybase[1], true)); > > $this = self::$_instance_array[$this->_base]; > > It seems that it should be code-wise do-able by simply having the guts of > PHP (the C/C++ code PHP is created with) create a new object - just as it > did when creating $this, then just change the pointer that $this is looking > at to the new object, throw the old object onto the heap for cleanup. Why > is > that so difficult? > > > I don't think so. You can always double check here: https://bugs.php.net/search.php (Type: Feature/Change Request). As to be able to dynamically change $this (which in PHP is a reference to the calling object), I personally do not think it is a good idea. Particularly if more than one person is working on the file/project - you expect $this to be something, have specific methods, but ends up being a different object.