Re: Static properties

Marcus Boerger wrote:

It is just some decision that was taken that the newer OO stuff should be a bit more strict.

I don't remember any such decision. I don't even remember a discussion about it. I'm aware of the efforts of some people to make PHP less PHP and more Java and thus we end up in a situation where: class foo{}; foo::$bar = 1; is a fatal error. This makes things that I really like about PHP impossible. By now I'm used to being not constrained by a static language and having such restrictions placed on new features makes no sense to me. I write code that does things like this: class Customer {

    function get($id)
    {
        $res = $DB->query("select * from customer where id=".((int)$id);
        while ($row = $DB->fetchRow($res)) {
            foreach ($row as $key = $value) {
                $this->{$key} = $value;
             }
        }
    }

} All nice and dynamic. Now, I thought why not make my site options work in a similar way but use class variables (a.k.a. static properties). So I made my options class class options {

    function load()
    {
        $res = $DB->query("select * from options");
        while ($row = $DB->fetchRow($res)) {
            self::${$row['KEY']} = $row['VALUE'];
        }
    }

} so I could for example througout my code use simple: if (options::$allow_anon) {

    ...

} without having to make an istance of the class. Simple and beutiful PHP way. All I needed to do to get a new site option variable was to insert "into options(key, value) values ('foo', 'bar')" and I would instantly have my options::$foo. Unfortunately I was faced with a fatal error about having to declare all static properties. I was afraid that this was not caused by any technical difficulty, but by desire to make PHP less PHP. I propose that we remove this restriction in PHP 5.2.0 and that we consider this attitude towards making PHP more strict and less dynamic in the future. Edin