Re: Class Friendship in PHP

Bishop Bettini wrote on 10/12/2015 14:44:

On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 12:02 AM, Dustin Wheeler <mdwheele@ncsu.edu> wrote:

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.

I think it's the other way around: a single object declares its friendship with an entire namespace.

I guess the point is that if package visibility were also implemented, you could simply make the relevant methods public, and the class as a whole private to the namespace. Any public APIs could then be on a public class in the same namespace, e.g in the same way as having methods "public final function foo()" and "protected function do_foo()", you could have "public class Thing" referencing "private class InternalThing". The advantage of friend declarations seems to be precisely that they are *not* making a general declaration of scope, but marking very specific couplings. If a large number of classes need access to something marked private, it's clearly not really private. Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]