It seems today is a day for coding standards ;)
At the moment, I do not have a justification for making these
__get()/__set()/__isset()/__unset() magic methods public. However, I
can think of several reasons they should not be public, as nicely
presented by Ralph.
Can anyone think of a reasonable use case for why these methods need to
be public? Even if we find some use case, perhaps we could still
strongly suggest these methods be protected, unless the author has a
very good reason for making them public.
Thoughts anyone?
Cheers,
Gavin
Simon Mundy wrote:
Hi Ralph
I was about to ask the same thing, but your explanation makes complete
sense.
Should we take this as another unofficial coding standard that these
magic methods should all be protected (except __construct, of course,
for where it needs to be public)?
The reason it was made protected was to prevent the masses from using
the __get()/__set()/__isset()/__unset() methods directly, as that
usage is frowned upon.. ie: $session->__get($name);
The reason is to protect from unintentional misuse. As this scenario:
$session = new Zend_Session();
$var = array('foo'=>'bar');
$session->__set($var, 'value');
Would produce unexpected results.
-ralph
