On 27 May 2016 13:34:17 GMT+01:00, Lester Caine <les...@lsces.co.uk> wrote: >Hence the 'in an ideal world'! It is perhaps worth making clear that a >'typed property' element IS simply a holder for the pointer to the real >element while the untyped properties are the element themselves?
In database terms, a property - typehinted or not, scalar, whatever - is like a column. On a particular instance (= row) each property will have some particular value. Consider how "father" would be modelled as a foreign key in the DB. If you don't know the father, you would insert a null, not reference a special row representing The NullFather. And if you discovered the father was incorrect, you would update the row to point at a new record, not change the name on the old father record - it is not the name that was incorrect, only the relationship. So in OO you do the same: if you don't know the father, you store a null in that field. If you want to change the father, you point at a new object, you don't go in and edit the existing one. $this->father = $newFather; There's no "empty object" here, no need to "reset" the object which was incorrectly assigned to the father property, just a new association representing the corrected information. -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP] -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
