Dynamically add a private property to an object

Question

I have a class:

class Foo {
    // Accept an assoc array and appends its indexes to the object as property
    public function extend($values){
        forea         


        

Answer 1

Just plain, bad design.

What's the purpose of adding a private [!] field at runtime? Existent methods can't rely on such added fields, and you'd be messing with the object functionality.

If you want your object to behave like an hashmap [i.e. you can just call $obj -> newField = $newValue], consider using magic __get and __set methods.