The new PHP version introduces, among other things, property hooks, asymmetric visibility for class properties, and a new HTML5 DOM API.
With property hooks, get and set logic can be defined directly on the property declaration (similar to C#), rather than using separate getFoo()/setFoo() methods or the somewhat unwieldy magic methods __get/__set as before. This significantly improves the flexibility and readability of the code.
Before property hooks, the get and set logic looked like this:
<?php
class Intxample
{
private bool $negative = false;
public int $value = 0;
public function getValue(): int
{
if ($this->negative) {
return $this->value * -1;
}
return $this->value;
}
public function setValue(int $value)
{
$this->value = abs($value);
$this->negative = $value < 0;
}
}
$example = new Intxample();
$example->setValue(-5);
print $example->getValue(); // Output: -5
In comparison, here is the new syntax:
<?php
class Intxample
{
private bool $negative = false;
public int $value = 0 {
get {
if ($this->negative) {
return $this->value * -1;
}
return $this->value;
}
set(int $value) {
$this->value = abs($value);
$this->negative = $value < 0;
}
}
}
$example = new Intxample();
$example->value = -5;
print $example->value; // Output: -5
Whether this really brings such a big advantage for developers is up for debate. From my point of view, it makes the variable block at the beginning of a class much more confusing. I suppose that’s a matter of taste.
