Re: Magic method visibility in PHP 5.3+

Hi!

In PHP 5.3 snaps, it appears that magic methods __isset, __unset, __get, __set must have a public visibility or the engine will trigger a warning. Why is this? It works as expected in 5.x branches.

I think it doesn't actually work as expected - because as far as I can see, visibility is ignored on these methods. Consider this code: class Foo {

        private function __get($name) {
                return 42;
        }

} $z = new Foo(); echo $z->bar; On 5.2, it happily prints 42, even though you should not have access to __get from outside the class, if it were true "private". Having "private" there actually is somewhat misleading - while it looks like internal API and thus can be changed by the class developer at will or dropped altogether, it is actually a public API which is exposed to the client.

I am not sure why this should be enforced as it should be up to the developer as to which methods in the API should be exposed for direct invocation.

I don't think magic methods are meant to be directly invoked. That's why they are magic ;) In any case, since these methods are invoked in "magic" way anyway, regardless of visibility, putting non-public visibility on them makes little sense and actually makes people think they can not be invoked from outside of the class - while it is not the case, they can. Thus, even if there was no warning, I'd recommend never putting non-public visibility on them. -- Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/ (408)253-8829 MSN: stas@zend.com