On Sun, 2007-10-07 at 11:42 +0100, Tony Marston wrote: > > The definition of OOP is "programming which is oriented around objects, thus > taking advantage of Encapsulation, Polymorphism, and Inheritance to increase > code reuse and decrease code maintenance". It is possible to do this in PHP > 4 without all the fancy add-ons which appeared in PHP 5. How do I know? > Because I have written an entire framework using objects in PHP 4, and the > result is high code reuse and low maintainence. There are no additional OO > features in PHP 5 which could deliver any measurable improvements. > > > any oo php4 'program' is inherently > > weak for the reasons i have sighted, namely the implementation can be > > latched onto producing tightly coupled code. > > Coupling is the degree of interaction between two modules. Low levels of > coupling tend to create code which is more reusable, whereas high levels of > coupling tend to create code which is less reusable. Coupling is therefore > directly related to reusability. Making all variables private does not *in > itself* make the code more reusable, therefore it does not make the code > more "coupled" or less "coupled".
Well, Nathan is assuming that if you have a public member that you probably didn't provide get/set wrappers for it. As such directly using the member variable does indeed increase the couple of your code to that module because if the variable needs to change in some way it's not possible to change the behaviour across the board without updating all uses of the member variable. However, just because it's public doesn't mean it doesn't have a get/set wrapper and doesn't mean it should be used directly. Yes, using a private declaration enforces use of the get/set wrapper, but once again, documentation can make this point also and as such marking a member variable as private is just syntactic sugar. Strangely enough though, PHP5 provides the means to NOT provide get/set methods and still modify the behaviour of direct access to a member variable via the magic __get/__set methods. Therefore the coupling issue is pretty moot for PHP5 regardless of how the variable is accessed. Cheers, Rob. -- ........................................................... SwarmBuy.com - http://www.swarmbuy.com Leveraging the buying power of the masses! ........................................................... -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
