Abstract Constants

By WebSmithery

There’s a pretty common pattern to declare “abstract class constants” in PHP.

PHP lazy loading will prevent the error “Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Cannot declare self-referencing constant self::NAME” if the constant is overloaded.

This makes an effective ‘abstract constant’, that must be defined to be usable.

• Class Constants (PHP manual)

• Class Abstraction (PHP manual)

• Abstract constants in PHP - Force a child class to define a constant