In php5 static variables in functions behave a little differently when the functions are member functions of a class. The problems start when the inheritance starts copying out functions into the child function table hashes. For instance, consider the following bit of code :

<?php
    class A {
        function f()
        {
            static $a = 10;
            $a++;
            echo __CLASS__.": $a\n";
        }
    }
    class B extends A { }
    
    $a = new A();
    $b = new B();
    $a->f();
    $b->f();
?>

Now, I'd assumed that it would obviously produce 11 12 as the output. Sort of ran into this while messing around with the zend_op_array reference counting code. The static members are killed off before the reference is checked.

gopal@knockturn:/tmp$ /opt/php5/bin/php -q test.php 
A: 11
A: 11

I definitely was slightly freaked and wrote up an almost identical bit of C++ code to just test out my preconceptions about static variables.

#include <stdio.h>

class A 
{
public:
    void f() {
        static int a = 10;
        a++;
        printf("A: %d\n", a);
    }
};

class B : public A {};

int main()
{
    A a;
    B b;
    a.f();
    b.f();
}

But static variables inside a function in C++ behave identical to whether it was declared inside a class or outside. There seems to be no special handling for member functions unlike what php shows.

gopal@knockturn:/tmp$ ./static-test 
A: 11
A: 12

I am not enough of a dynamic language geek to decide which one's the right way to do it. Actually if I really had my way, there wouldn't be any static variables in functions at all. They're actually too much like global variables in terms of life-time.

Anyway, using a class static should make it behave like C++.

posted at: 02:01 | path: /php | permalink | Tags: public, hacks, php