Re: [RFC[ Property accessor hooks, take 2

Hey, On Wed, Feb 21, 2024 at 7:58 PM Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com> wrote: > 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. thank you for this proposal. there are some points i'd like to make into this discussion: * Thank you for the removal of $field, it was non-idomatic from a PHP POV. * I would prefer that the short syntax $foo => null; be voted upon separately. Personally I think it could be confusing and is too close to a regular assignment for default value and I prefer not to have it and keep the rest of the RFC. * The magic of detecting if a property is virtual or backed is - like Rowan said - subtle. I would also prefer this to be managed via an explicit mechanism, by for example keywording the property as "virtual", instead of the implicit way with the parsing based detection. * As Doctrine project maintainer, we have had some troubles supporting read only properties for proxies. I would have hoped that with hooks I can overwrite a readonly property and "hook" into it instead by defining a getter, but "no setter". From my read of the RFC this would not be allowed and throws a compile time error. Could you maybe clarify why at least this special case is not possible? I didn't immediately get it from the RFC section on readonly as it only speaks about the problems in abstract. greetings Benjamin > > -- > Larry Garfield > larry@garfieldtech.com >