Why is the usage of $this in PHP necessary when referencing methods or variables in the same class?

Question

I was explaining to a Java developer why his method call wasn\'t working. He just needed to add $this->method_name();

He then asked me, \"Why do

Answer 1

If I have to guess: Because it was easier than the alternatives. Object oriented support in PHP has always been very much of a hack. I vaguely remember reading a discussion about the upcoming closure support that will appear in PHP 5.3. Appearently it was really, really hard to implement lexical closures in PHP due to it's scoping rules. Probably because you can nest a class in a function in another class and stuff like that. All that freedom possibly makes stuff like this incredibly hard.