PHP inheritance and protected member visibility

Question

I\'ve found something that appears to be a strange inheritance issue in PHP.

From the PHP manual:

Members declared protected can be accessed only

Answer 1

There is no rationale about this, it has been reported 2 years ago: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52120

Answer 2

You can access those methods because there is a declaration of them as protected in Foo, which is your parent and that gives you permission to access it. If you remove the declaration from the parent and declare the protected method in B you will get a Fatal Error.

This is reported as a bug in PHP https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=50892