Hello internals, Many, many people start their files fairly religiously:
<?php declare(strict_types=1); and I say "religiously" because from talking to people in real life, reddit, workplaces, etc, very few php programmers actually know what this does but do it nonetheless. I've heard everything from "it enables type hints" to "it makes it so that I know I got my class instead of an int" to getting it right, but thinking it applies to code calling from another file, and not them calling code. Granted, I haven't done a scientific poll (though I did one on Reddit this morning for giggles to ensure it isn't just the people I know). One thing is clear is that "strict types" may be a bit of poor word choice and gives people a false sense of security that it is "safe" or "more correct" when this obviously isn't true. Thus, I'd like to propose, for PHP 9, simply renaming it from strict_types to scalar_type_coercion and flipping the value: <?php declare(strict_types=1); to <?php declare(scalar_type_coercion=0); Perhaps it might even be worth adding a secondary vote to flip the default, such that if you want to "old" behavior back: <?php declare(scalar_type_coercion=1); I'm not attached to the name "scalar_type_coercion" by any stretch, but I do feel that "strict_types" gives people the wrong idea about what is going on when they enable it and renaming it to something more clear might be helpful. What are your thoughts? PS. Personally, I would rather unify non-strict and strict in some way that makes sense ... so, that route sounds nice too. Robert Landers Software Engineer Utrecht NL
