Re: supporting the final keyword for properties

On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 2:25 PM, Ferenc Kovacs <tyra3l@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > The recent >http://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg59301.html > discussion > made me wonder why did we decide not supporting the final keywords for > properties as it would provide an easy way for read-only attributes (const > would be a better choice in performance wise, but then you can only set it > in your declaration where no dynamic expression is allowed.) > > I would like it to work the same way as it does in java( > > http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se7/html/jls-4.html#jls-4.12.4) > eg. > you can set the initial value either in the declaration or later on, but > after it is set, you can't change it, trying to do that would create a > recoverable fatal error (or throwing an exception which extends > RuntimeException). > > What do you think? Would this be viable? Is there any still-present reason > why we shouldn't support that? I don't like this overloaded meaning of "final". "final" currently means "cannot be overwritten by inheritance". This would add a second meaning which would be somewhat similar to "const" (but only somewhat). Nikita