为什么雄辩的模型关系不使用括号，它们如何工作？

Question

I kept searching the web for an hour but couldn't figure this out. If we look at the eloquent relationships documentation: https://laravel.com/docs/5.2/eloquent-relationships

The example User model:

<?php

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class User extends Model
{
    /**
     * Get the phone record associated with the user.
     */
    public function phone()
    {
        return $this->hasOne('App\Phone');
    }
}

Just below it, how to access the phone number of a user with id=1:

$phone = User::find(1)->phone;

Why is it phone and not phone() and what is the difference?

Also how does it work? If I try to call an object->name without parenthesis in my code PHP thinks I am looking for a class variable named name?

Some extra information:

It looks like phone is returning object(App\Models\Phone) and phone() is returning object(Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\HasOne)

If I run the code below:

User::find(1)->phone->count()

Framework executes following SQL statements:

select * from `phone` where `phone`.`user_id` = '1' and `phone`.`user_id` is not null limit 1
select count(*) as aggregate from `phone`

If I run the code below:

User::find(1)->phone()->count()

Framework executes following SQL statement:

select count(*) as aggregate from `phone` where `phone`.`user_id` = '1' and `phone`.`user_id` is not null

Answer 1

I don't know Laravel/Eloquent and you would need to show the find() method for more information, but User::find(1) returns an object so the ->phone accesses the phone property of that object. This has nothing to do with the find() method that you have shown. It is shorter than this that would do the same:

$obj = User::find(1);
$phone = $obj->phone;

Do a var_dump($obj); and you should see a phone property. If not, then another possibility is that the class implements a __get() magic method so that when you attempt to access the phone property it runs the phone() method and returns the value.

As for the first explanation, the same can be done with arrays:

function test() { return array('phone'=>'713-555-1212'); }

echo test()['phone'];