Re: [patch] Late static bindings (LSB)

Michael Lively wrote:

Since the call A::foo() is completely defined and that no "fall back" occurs, I guess "A" is more expected as a result of this script. Your patch will return B. I discussed this matter quite heavily on #php.pecl and the expectations were also that "A" should get returned here.

I've taken a look at this patch and for the most part I agree that your code SHOULD return 'A'. However, one thing that I think is very important is that you are able to somehow pass-thru who the caller is when dealing with inheritance. For instance: <?php class Foo {

       const TEST_CONST = 'foo';

       public function test()
       {
               return static::TEST_CONST;
       }

} class Bar extends Foo {

       const TEST_CONST = 'bar';

} echo Foo::test()."\n"; echo Bar::test()."\n"; ?> This works as expected outputting: foo bar However, this concept becomes very inflexible when dealing with some aspects of inheritance. Consider a child class that needs to do additional work in its test() method and then called the parent test() method to do the normal work. <?php class Bar2 extends Foo {

       const TEST_CONST = 'bar2';

       public function test()
       {
               //do class specific things
               //try to continue the function chain
               return parent::test();
       }

} ?> This will also output 'foo'. While I agree that in this case this concept does make sense, I do think it is important for there to be a way to have this function return 'bar2'. The way that would most make sense to me and still somewhat follow the rules is to change the return to static::test(); However this causes a seg fault in your current patch. I will do a little more checking to see why you are segfaulting here. That's an endless recursion, hence the segfault ;)

In either case without having some way to chain callers this is going to become a very annoying problem when utilizing inheritance with late static binding. I aggree that it could be a problem indeed, but you usually use LSB to

avoid having to redeclare static functions in child classes, if you do anyway, LSB looses its interest. Regards

-- Mike Lively http://www.ds-o.com

-- Etienne Kneuss http://www.colder.ch Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction. -- Pascal