Re: Getting rid of "underscore for private method names" codingstandard

Christian Weiske wrote: > Hello all, > > > I refer to http://pear.php.net/manual/en/standards.naming.php > > Time has come to get rid of the "Private class members are preceded by > a single underscore" rule. There are several reasons for that: > > 1. PHP5 has visibility modificator support (public, private, protected) > 2. Having an underscore preceding private methods and class variables > makes it impossible to open up the API without breaking existing > code. Hi, This assertion is untrue because by definition private methods/variables are only used internally and are not a part of the API, thus they can be changed/renamed at will using a search/replace with no consequences. If one wants to expose a previously private variable or method, as far as external users are concerned, this is no different than adding a new variable or method. However, I think a *far* better suggestion would be to forbid the use of the private keyword unless the intention is to prevent any possible modification because of race conditions or other critical coordination issues. Instead, we require all variable to be protected or public unless there is extreme justification. In my experience working with other people's code, the "private" keyword simply makes it impossible to implement code reuse without resorting to vast swaths of cut/paste. This will have the side effect of doing the exact naming suggestion you've made, since the current CS forbids _naming with protected variables/methods. Greg