Hacker News Reader

Would REEEEEEALLY like to see readonly properties in classes.

They had a proposal a while ago to add getter and setter function support, which would be cool and would've allowed it (with some function overhead), but is probably a bit OTT for PHP.

readonly properties would allow you to make truly solid classes. You'd be able to lock them down from outside interference.

Methods could trust that property values hadn't been tampered with from outside, while still providing a way for outside code to read those values extremely quickly, without function overhead.

I think it's an awesome idea, especially since the getter/setter proposal failed. It's very PHPy, and it strikes a nice middle ground between fully public properties and private ones.

External code really shouldn't be able to mess with my class's internal properties anyway, it violates separation of concerns.

View on HN

class whatever{ private $Properties=array(); function __set($key,$val){ try{ if(!isset($this->Properties[$key])){ $this->Properties[$key]=$val; } }catch(Exception $e){ //... } } function __get($key){ try{ if(isset($this->Properties[$key])){ return $this->Properties[$key]; } }catch(Exception $e){ //... } } }