private, protected, readonly, public

Hello internals, __get() and __set() are great, but 90% of the time, I find myself using them to create public readonly properties. The only problem with this is it is horridly inefficient, consuming at least 1 function call and one switch statement (or equiv) per property read. Would it be possible to create a new object property attribute: readonly class xx { readonly $bar; } $o = new xx(); $o->bar = 10; >>> FATAL ERROR This way, PHP would allow reading (as if it were public), but only allow writing from within the class. I think it could really boost performance of complicated application logic that wishes to enforce good visibility. Comments? PS. What brought this up was some serious performance issues in a piece of code that I am working with - most of which can be tied back to __get() performance. -- Best regards, Jason Garber mailto:jason@ionzoft.com IonZoft, Inc.