note 100920 deleted from language.oop5.visibility by danbrown

Note Submitter: Craig ---- This is in response to ryan lange below. I suspect this is not a quirk. The docs state: "Members declared as private may only be accessed by the class that defines the member." This means ChildClass2 *never* accesses the variable defined in the parent class, but always accesses its own local values. Likewise, ParentClass can't access private vars set in ChildClass2. If you want this behaviour, then you should use the protected keyword, not private. To try explain what's happening: ChildClass2 sets $this->foo, but in reality it's creating a localised variable on the fly (ChildClass2::foo, rather than setting ParentClass::foo). I can't find a reference to it, but I would hazard a guess that vars created in this fashion are private by default. Also ParentClass never sets ParentClass::foo to "foo", because ParentClass::__construct() is never called (only ChildClass2's construct is called). This is why, when you call $child2->foo() you get nothing back, because the ParentClass can't access the var ChildClass2::foo, and ParentClass::foo was never set to a value.