On Monday, 2 June 2025 at 22:05, Rob Landers <rob@bottled.codes> wrote:
> No offense, but this feels like it was written by someone who doesn’t use > non-strict mode very often. As yes, saying this to me, someone that is known to have said on stage, multiple times, during talks that > The strict_types declare was a mistake. Something I even reiterated 7 weeks ago at a Drupal conference. [1] It would be nice that you don't make assumption about how I write PHP code, as I use weak and strict mode extensively while being annoyed with both modes constantly. Moreover, even if one uses strict mode one must still know how weak mode behaves as closures/callables do not follow the typing mode in which they have been declared. > The rules around coercion are pretty simple and well documented. Considering I have given *multiple* talks about PHP's type system and type coercions rules, many people do *not* find them simple or intuitive and get bitten by them constantly. > Further, this makes a ton of shorthand nearly impossible — the manual casting > to bool in strict mode is one of the most annoying casts someone has to do > (and people screw up order of operations all the time leading to subtle bugs > worse than coercion). Bringing this into all of php is probably not a good > idea. It would have been nice to showcase some of these shorthands rather than hiding them behind some sort of mystic as a counterargument. I really would like to know in which cases you use non-boolean values as argument to boolean parameters. People creating more subtle and worse bugs due to arbitrary casting is precisely why I want to unify the typing modes, so it's good to know that we think somewhat the same. >> Type juggling of strings to bool is similarly error-prone. The strings "" >> and "0" are converted to false, but "false", " ", and other strings which an >> (int) cast converts to 0 are coerced to true. > > If I understand correctly, you are saying it is weird why the bytes 66 61 6C > 73 65 are “true” and 30 is a special case, but not 20? If I remember my > history correctly, 30 is special-cased because forms used to send “0” on > checkboxes (if it sent it at all; it changed from decade to decade). I know the reason why we coerce the string "0" to false. But it is very atypical compared to every other programming language, so yes it is "weird". > I don’t see the benefit of removing this implicit coercion. The statement is noted. Regards, Gina P. Banyard [1] https://youtu.be/85fgBcV3BuM?t=2832
