I think there's a more fundamental flaw here than just pointing to
'numeric' as an alternative. The internal IS_* setting is
meaningless for countless pieces of data floating around in PHP,
arguably far more than the ones for which it truly represents the
'semantic' type. Continuing what Stas said, it's no coincidence our
internal functions transparently translate arguments to the required
types (except for the rare cases where it's not possible).
The other course of action is to change the implementation so that it
behaves like the one for internal functions - with emphasis on
conversion instead of validation of IS_*. We can consider being more
strict - and error-out on non-numeric strings instead of producing
0; If we were to start from scratch today, we'd probably do the same
for internal functions. Encouraging the equivalent of strict is_*()
checks is very inconsistent with both our entire internal functions
library, as well as the common behavior of PHP. It doesn't come to
say that it's not useful in some cases - but for these, using is_*()
should be a suitable.
Zeev
At 20:40 01/07/2009, Ilia Alshanetsky wrote:
Tom,
Type hinting is optional you don't have to use it. However, the
"numeric" type I've added specifically addresses that point.
Ilia Alshanetsky
CIO/CSO
Centah Inc.
On 2009-07-01, at 1:22 PM, Tom Boutell <t...@punkave.com> wrote:
I expect this would be a problem for folks who are relying on the fact
that they can parse configuration files and web inputs purely as
strings, yet numeric fields containing string representations of
numbers will actually behave as numbers if called upon to do so.
Speaking of which, when I'm in a hurry and large numbers (or negative
numbers) are not dangerous in that particular context, I sometimes
validate a numeric field like this:
$x = $_REQUEST['x'] + 0;
And then assume $x will be a number - perhaps an obnoxious number,
maybe even a huge floating point number with an exponent, but a
number. Is there a flaw in that reasoning that I'm not aware of?
On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 1:15 PM, Alain Williams<a...@phcomp.co.uk>
wrote:
On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 12:59:59PM -0400, Ilia Alshanetsky wrote:
There has been quite a bit of discussion on this list, IRC,
developer
meetings, etc... about introduction of type hinting to PHP. Most
people appear to think that this would be a good idea, but there
is a
reason why it is not in PHP already. The main source of conflict
...
Another desirable result of type hinting is that it would strengthen
reflection ... one use of that would be automatic generation of
WSDL files. This is something that I am currently struggling to do,
not helped by the completely cr*p documentation of this - I am not
talking about PHP documentation here by W3 & other places :-(
+1 to type hinting.
--
Alain Williams
Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking,
Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256 http://www.phcomp.co.uk/
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd. Registration Information:
http://www.phcomp.co.uk/contact.php
Past chairman of UKUUG: http://www.ukuug.org/
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