Re: [chiPHPug-discuss] object variable naming

[David R. <da...@ro...>]

>
> $subscriber = new Subscriber();
> $profile = $subscriber->getValue("profile");
> $profile = new Profile($profile); // oops, now $profile is ambiguous
>
> By the way, I could just access $subscriber->profile rather than creating a
> local variable for $profile, but I like making the class members protected
> so I'm not tempted to set them directly and bypass any internal
> functionality in the class. If I could make the members read-only, that
> would work -- but PHP doesn't offer that, right?
>

For situations like this, I'll use the __get($name) magic function.
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.overloading.php#language.oop5.overloading.members

This allows you to set a member variable as Private, and yet still allow
$object->readonly syntax and functionality.
Additionally, you easily avoid having to worry about ambiguous variable
names when you only really wanted to get a read-only copy of a member
variable.

Hope that helps.
-Rovani