As a general PHP user I am shocked that you use it like this. Clearly abuse in my opinion.

From a dev perspective, it probably should be supported if we claim it is supported in documentation. If not, it's just a bad API and we should change the API.

After looking into it more, this doesn't seem to be a bug. Only the property in the reflection object becomes accessible; it doesn't modify the `$this` instance. Can someone more knowledgeable in reflection review this?

First of all, that's a horrendous way of doing things. You can accomplish this quite easily by using the @property DocBlock:

/**
 * Class Entity
 *
 * @property string $name
 */

That said, ReflectionProperty::setAccessible(bool) only affects calls to ReflectionProperty::get/setValue(), it doesn't actually change anything in the target object.

As specified in the comments, this is not a bug.

I don't see why this should be a bad thing to do. (Maybe defining properties in DocBlock @property is a much better way than unsetting them. But that's not the point)

The point is that although if we would, we have to store the actual data in an data-structure that differs from the IDEs point of view. So debugging etc. is much more complicated than it could be.

--testscript-
/**
 * Class Entity
 *
 * @property string $name
 */
class Entity {


    public function __construct() {
    }

    public function __set($name, $val) {
        echo "setting $name ";
        $this->$name = $val;
        $ref = new ReflectionObject($this);
        $ref->getProperty($name)->setAccessible(FALSE);
    }

    public function __get($name) {
        echo "getting $name";
    }
}

$entity = new Entity();
$entity->name = "value";
echo $entity->name;
--/testscript-

Above example will call __get() once - and afterwards access the property direcly.

If you have an better approach - please write me.