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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T21:02:38+00:00

After enabling strict warnings in PHP 5.2, I saw a load of strict standards

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After enabling strict warnings in PHP 5.2, I saw a load of strict standards warnings from a project that was originally written without strict warnings:

Strict Standards: Static function Program::getSelectSQL() should not be abstract in Program.class.inc

The function in question belongs to an abstract parent class Program and is declared abstract static because it should be implemented in its child classes, such as TVProgram.

I did find references to this change here:

Dropped abstract static class functions. Due to an oversight, PHP 5.0.x and 5.1.x allowed abstract static functions in classes. As of PHP 5.2.x, only interfaces can have them.

My question is: can someone explain in a clear way why there shouldn’t be an abstract static function in PHP?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    static methods belong to the class that declared them. When extending the class, you may create a static method of the same name, but you are not in fact implementing a static abstract method.

    Same goes for extending any class with static methods. If you extend that class and create a static method of the same signature, you are not actually overriding the superclass’s static method

    EDIT (Sept. 16th, 2009)
    Update on this. Running PHP 5.3, I see abstract static is back, for good or ill. (see http://php.net/lsb for more info)

    CORRECTION (by philfreo)
    abstract static is still not allowed in PHP 5.3, LSB is related but different.

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