Re: property de-referencing

On 30 April 2013 16:15, Rasmus Schultz <rasmus@mindplay.dk> wrote: > At the risk of starting a separate discussion, the recently added > ClassName::class constant provides a way to statically reference a class, > which frankly has very few practical applications in comparison - the need > to reference properties is usually much more prevalent and repetitive than > the need to reference a class; assuming your classes have more than one > property each, heh. The feature as such is also somewhat crippled, since > what comes out of it is a string and not a class-reference. I would caution against generalising use cases. Personally, ::class is something I can use multiple times a day. This I'm not so sure about. Your use case is not my use case, and vice versa. :) > I think there is still a pretty strong case for static property-references, > but since any new language-feature is generally a pretty hard sell around > here, I'm letting this one go for now. Why does this have to be a language feature? It obviously already works in userland, as your own Symfony 2 examples show. One could write a PropertyReference class right now with literally the only difference being the lack of a builtin operator (ie new PropertyReference($obj, 'prop') versus ^$obj->prop): the fact that nobody seems to have done this in a major framework I know of suggests that there isn't a strong need for encapsulating the indirection beyond the $obj->$prop syntax that's worked forever. Adam