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Postings from March 2011
On Mon, 07 Mar 2011, Chris Prather wrote:
>
> In my opinion you're moving from dangerous to useless at best. I feel
> that the *semantics* of this syntax are confusing. They confuse method
> dispatch with assignment*.
I disagree. The semantics of setting attributes/properties are the
same as assignment:
* setting the attribute multiple times to the same value is not supposed
to have any additional effect beyond what the first assignment did
* the attribute is supposed to return the value it was last set to
Attribute setters/getters are *not* supposed to be generic methods; they
are syntactic sugar for assigning and querying values.
And many languages (VB, C#, JavaScript, of the top of my head) all use
assignment syntax for property manipulation.
The fact that under the hood they all perform a method dispatch is an
implementation detail that doesn't have to be exposed to the user.
> To me it's a dangerously short step from
> $obj->attr = $x; to $obj->{attr} = $x; where you drop the
> encapsulation entirely.
This is simply not correct. You cannot know what the assignment is going
to do, as $obj may be tied (implementation detail, you don't have to know),
so everything is as encapsulated as the class author wants.
> Suggesting that encapsulation is a bad thing, or even an undesirable
> thing is the "horrible idea". Especially for the beginners that the
> advantages of a $obj->attr = $x syntax would primarily benefit.
Nobody suggested that encapsulation is a bad thing, so I call strawman here.
Cheers,
-Jan
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