Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 63. Today I'm talking with André Rømcke, about an RFC that he's proposing titled property write/set visibility. Hello André, would you please introduce yourself?

Hi Derick, I'm, where to start, that's a wide question but I think I'll focus on the technical side of it. I'm been doing PHP for now 15 plus years. Actually started in, eZ systems, now Ibexa, met with you actually Derick.

Yep that's a long time ago for me.

And well I came from dotnet and front and side of things. Eventually I learned more and more in PHP and you were one of the ones getting me deeper into that, while you were working on eZ components. I was trying to profile and improve eZ publish which what's left of the comments on that that point. A long time ago, though. A lot of things and I've been working in engineering since then I've been working now actually working with training and more of that, and the services and consulting. One of the pet peeves I've had with PHP has been properties for a long time, so I kind of wanted several, several years ago to look into this topic. Overall, like readonly, immutable. To be frank from our side that the only thing I really need is readonly, but I remember the discussions I was kind of involved for at least on the sideline in 2012/ 2013. Readonly and then there was property accessors. And I remember and there was a lot of people with different needs. So that's kind of the background of why I proposed this.

We'll get back to these details in a moment, I'm sure. The title of the RFC is property write/set visibility. Can you give me a short introduction of what visibility actually means in this contract, in this context?

Visibility, I just use the word visibility because that's what doc usually in php.net says, but it's about access the property, so to say, or it being visible to your code. That's it on visibility but today we can only set one rule so to say, we can only say: this is either public, private, or protected, and in other languages, there are for good reasons, possibilities to have asynchronous visibility. So, or disconnected or whatever you want to call it, between: Please write and read. And then in, with accessors you'll also have isset() and unset() but that's really not the topic here at this point.

PHP sort of supports these kind of things, with it's magic methods, like with __get() and __set(). And then also isset() and unset(). You can sort of implement something like this, of course, in your own implementation, but that's, of course, ugly, I mean, ugly or, I mean there was no other way for doing it and I remember, you made have a user that in eZ Components that you mentioned earlier. What is the main problem that you're wanting to solve with what this RFC proposes?

the high level use case is in order to let people, somehow, define that their