[jacobyoder]

I'd tried to put together an RFC years ago to introduce groovy-style accessors in PHP.

$this->foo

would look for a getFoo() method, and execute if it existed, or not if not. Felt like that was easier to reason about, fwiw, but I couldn't get it off the ground. Even then, there were multiple C#-style get/set proposals floating around, so this style seems to be the one more people like. Not a fan of the style, personally, and probably won't use these much directly any time soon. If it helps people maintaining libraries that I use to deliver code that is cleaner and more productive to them... I'm OK with that.

[wvenable]

I'm not a fan of that kind of magic in my languages but such a thing was already easily doable in PHP. You could just have a base class that implements __get and __set so that $this->foo automatically calls $this->getFoo().

[mgkimsal]

can't do that if you declare the properties on the class. __get only works for undefined properties.

[wvenable]

Well don't do that then. :)

[hks0]

That advice doesn't always work in real life; otherwise for every compiler or linter check in any language, we could drop all those checks and tell the programmers not to do that.

E.g. if a base class declares a variable it can potentially break its children. Whose at fault here?

I agree with your original comment though. And if the bypass of exisitng fields is badly wanted, somehow marking __get to disregard them makes more sense to me.

[munk-a]

Or, alternatively, use `__call`

[9dev]

Doctor, doctor, it always hurts when I press here…