On Tue, 18 Jun 2024, 17:40 Robert Landers, <landers.rob...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 think there's almost certainly a degree of truth, not just in PHP but programming in general, in the idea that there are many people who will blindly follow a convention for no better reason they once heard someone they considered more senior than themselves say the words "best practice" But I don't think the meaning of strict_types in PHP is unclear. It's right there in the manual https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.declarations.php#language.types.declarations.strict If anyone is daft enough to use a language feature without referencing what it means or what it does, let them clean up any problems which arise for them as a result. If I were to support any change to how this feature works for PHP 9, I think it would be providing a mechanism to enable it for all files at once, maybe either via a .ini setting such as strict_types_default=1 or a new declare which applies to all files included or autoloaded from that point on, i.e. a declare that could be used as the first line of an entrypoint script to make all files in a project have strict typing mode enabled/disabled (unless a particular file overrides for its own scope with its own declare). Changing the name to anything other than what it is now, with or without flipping the value, just seems like a major BC headache for no gain. -Dave >
