Classes: Constants

A class may contain definitions for named constants, which have public visibility. A class constant belongs to the class as a whole, so it is implicitly static. For example:

class Automobile {
  const DEFAULT_COLOR = "white";
  // ...
}

<<__EntryPoint>>
function main(): void {
  $col = Automobile::DEFAULT_COLOR;
  echo "\$col = $col\n";
}

$col = white

If a class constant's type is omitted, it is inferred from the initializer, which must be present. In this case, that type is string.

As we can see, outside its parent class, a class constant's name must be qualified by the scope-resolution operator, ::; after all, multiple classes might define constants by the same (unrelated) name.

Note that for some types—the legacy container types Vector, Map, Set, et al., and closures—there is no way to write an initializer that is considered to be a compile-time constant. Therefore, a class constant cannot have such a type. However, the types array, vec, dict, and set, can be used provided all their subinitializers are constant expressions.