Well, the truth is that there's no real preprocessor in PHP. The fact that it's impossible to use include*() or require*() in class definitions is by design, and is very unlikely (read "guaranteed not to") to change during the life of 4.x.

how odd.. I didn't see your "there is no real preprocessor" note earlier.

Alright. in that case, perhaps the documentation for require should be changed to say that require *is* subject to containing control structures.

That's how it is, and how it'll be in foreseeable future.

This seems like an easy enough addition, and it makes building large libraries of homologous classes MUCH easier.  Of course, there is a work-around: I can inherit numerous intermediate classes to simulate multiple inheritance, but that could theoretically become a VERY large overhead, if you have many "base" classes to inherit.  Doing so also makes it difficult to read the resulting code.

Besides... I thought require was supposed to act as a preprocessor pass. From the PHP docs:

~~~

The require() statement replaces itself with the specified file, much like the C preprocessor's #include works. 

[snip]

For instance, require() is not subject to any containing control structures. 

~~~

Well, 

> The require() statement replaces itself with the specified
> file, much like the C preprocessor's #include works. 

is an exact description. It doesn't that require() is part of PHP's preprocessor (there's none), but works _much like_ C preprocessor's #include.

And it really is NOT subject to containing control structures. As I understand it (and I'm no expert, PHP (Zend) works similarly to C _sans_ preprocessor: the code is compiled and then executed, with some of the C preprocessor features "hacked into" the compilation.