[RFC[ Property accessor hooks, take 2

Hello again, fine Internalians. After much on-again/off-again work, Ilija and I are back with a more polished property access hooks/interface properties RFC. It’s 99% unchanged from last summer; the PR is now essentially complete and more robust, and we were able to squish the last remaining edge cases. Baring any major changes, we plan to bring this to a vote in mid-March. https://wiki.php.net/rfc/property-hooks It’s long, but that’s because we’re handling every edge case we could think of. Properties involve dealing with both references and inheritance, both of which have complex implications. We believe we’ve identified the most logical handling for all cases, though. Note the FAQ question at the end, which explains some design choices. There’s one outstanding question, which is slightly painful to ask: Originally, this RFC was called “property accessors,” which is the terminology used by most languages. During early development, when we had 4 accessors like Swift, we changed the name to “hooks” to better indicate that one was “hooking into” the property lifecycle. However, later refinement brought it back down to 2 operations, get and set. That makes the “hooks” name less applicable, and inconsistent with what other languages call it. However, changing it back at this point would be a non-small amount of grunt work. There would be no functional changes from doing so, but it’s lots of renaming things both in the PR and the RFC. We are willing to do so if the consensus is that it would be beneficial, but want to ask before putting in the effort. -- Larry Garfield larry@garfieldtech.com