RE: [PHP-DEV] property de-referencing

Hi Mike, Missed your e-mail because it went to the list only. What you're demonstrating here is functionally equivalent to the simple example I provided. (The example was intended to show how this feature works, not necessarily how you would use it in practice.) The key difference, is that a native reference carries no contextual information with it - a form-helper for instance can't determine which object the referenced property belongs to, the name of the property, or even the fact that the variable is referencing an object-property in the first place. You also can't use the & operator to create a reference to a virtual (__get/__set) property, because you would be creating a reference to the value that is returned by the __get() method, rather than to a (virtual) property of an object. That's why form-helpers currently store references to objects, and reference properties using strings - rather than using native variable-references as in your example. --- From: "Ford, Mike" <M.Ford@leedsmet.ac.uk> To: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net> Cc: Date: Wed, 1 May 2013 13:20:32 +0000 Subject: RE: [PHP-DEV] property de-referencing I know I'm still somewhat of a beginner with OOP, and not at all into large-scale OOP frameworks (yet!), but I'm really struggling to understand why the existing & reference operator doesn't suffice for what you are after? If you could explain in words of as few syllables as possible what you would want to add to: class User { public $name; } $user = new User; $user->name = 'Rasmus'; $nameprop = &$user->name; var_dump($nameprop); // => 'Rasmus' $nameprop = 'Bob'; var_dump($nameprop); // => 'Bob' I would be immensely grateful, as I might then stand a chance of deciding whether I'm with you or agin you...! Cheers! Mike