Re: Re: [PEPr] Comment on RFC::ProtectedMembers

Alan Knowles wrote:

Arnaud Limbourg wrote:

The other langauges that I know of that support private & protected vars don't have any silly naming convention to indicate the priv/protected status of variables.

Most other languages dont have silly ($) to indicate variables, but in some people view (like me) they make an incredible improvement in readibility (although in reality they are there to speed up the parser).

Right, they are a part of the PHP language; that's rather different. I'm talking about additional coding requirements that groups (i.e. PEAR) decide to add on to the language, not built in restrictions of the compiler/parser. For example, in Java, you can use '$' at the beginning of a variable name, but people don't -- even if it might make the vars easier to read.

We already have lots of silly naming convensions WhichMayOrMayNot aid readibility..

... right -- and IIRC, the reasoning is largely to have consistency between PHP OO and the big OO languages like Java. I'm essentially proposing the same thing. In the end, of course, PEAR can do whatever they want, but this type of suggestion 1) is purely aesthetic, 2) is "unique" to PHP 3) will not be adopted by the PHP5 community-at-large, and 4) has already been voted down by the people who cared on pear-dev.

To add fuel to the fire an IDE may be able to show the scope.

Very few of them do.. - when I ssh into a remote server, on the other side of the planet, to locate a bug in a pear package, vi for sure doesnt do it... (yes I do that alot!)

Then for you, PHP will issue a nice E_FATAL error. I don't see the problem here ... Hans