Re: Class Friendship in PHP

Hi Dustin, ----- Mail original ----- > De: "Dustin Wheeler" <mdwheele@ncsu.edu> > > In my opinion, class friendship is explicit. I reach for this feature > when I need to say, "Hey, you two objects; one of you is going to > know > more than the rest of my system knows about this other object. I'm > doing this so that [insert domain-specific modeling concern or > justification]." In my usage, I don't know that I would use > friendship > as a means to make an entire package (namespace, in PHP's case) aware > of a single object. If I had to model this concern, I would instead > look to grab some tool that implemented some sort of namespace / > package visibility. > > The other thought I have is that when I go to an object that has > friended another, I want it to be clear and determined; the degree to > which I have coupled that object to collaborators through friendship. > Allowing friend __NAMESPACE__ allows this to grow somewhat > unbounded; which... isn't the end-of-the-world by any means and I can > see where it could be applied. Currently, however, I see it as a > misapplication of the tool? > > Haha, I apologize. I have a hard time finding concision sometimes. I > guess what I'm saying is that I am definitely not against this idea, > but that I'm not generally for it, yet. To me, it doesn't map as > cleanly to the goal of better encapsulation of behaviour in one > object > through strategic tighter-coupling to another object. I'd like to > hear > more of your thoughts to gain some perspective. Agreed. It's probably misleading. It was just a way to include the 'package-private' case, but allowing explicit class names only is probably better, at least for a first RFC. > > Would this be something you would consider being a candidate for > future development and exploration of the feature? Sure, but I already have a big todo list :). > > For inheritance rules, you may be interested by a small article I > > wrote on the subject > > (http://tekwire.net/joomla/projects/ideas/php-friend). > > > > Yes! You might be delighted to know that the current implementation > adheres to these rules, exactly. I honestly don't know how I didn't > come across your article in gathering references. Are you amenable to > me adding it to my list of references? Yes, of course. Thanks for your work. Hope to read your RFC soon. François