All,
I think that we should revisit the options on the table. I have a
feeling that much like many people didn't realize they're voting to
bring this into 5.3 - many weren't fully aware of the options on the
table and their implications (to be clear - I'm sure some were, but I
think many were not).
The options as I see them:
1. Do nothing. I think the vote established that this is not what
people want.
2. Move forward with the semantics of the current patch. This
approach has substantial drawbacks in my opinion, and is a strong
misfit with the rest of PHP (again, in my opinion). See previous
posts from Stas, Rasmus, myself and maybe others illustrating this
point. Lukas's 'Strict and Weak Typing RFC'
(http://wiki.php.net/rfc/typecheckingstrictandweak) has some good
insight as to why strict typing is problematic in PHP.
3. Implement 'weak' typing. What does that mean? Conversion rules
will be very similar to those for internal functions, but slightly
stricter (like I said, if we were to rewrite the conversion rules for
internal functions today - we'd probably make them slightly stricter,
too). For example, if you denote that an argument is supposed to be
an integer, then a string that looks like an integer (e.g. "17")
would be silently converted to an integer, however, a string that
does not look like an integer (e.g. "foo") will error out. We need
to come up with a complete pass/fail table, but that would be the
theme. Unlike option #2, this fits the rest of PHP quite well
(except for minor inconsistencies with internal functions - but these
are dwarfed in comparison to the inconsistencies of option #2).
Two other issues that we need to revisit:
1. Agree on when it will be implemented - I think it's pretty clear
it should not go to 5.3.
2. Make sure people understand *why* we're implementing it -
performance is certainly *not* the reason.
Before moving ahead with votes or committing the code, I suggest we
focus on the pros & cons of options #2 and #3. Since the
inconsistencies introduced by option #2 are very substantial (between
internal and userland functions, and also how values behave in PHP in
general), I suggest we focus on use cases where option #2 would be
truly needed and superior to option #3. In other words - what is the
added value and is it worth the price?
I think we can take Lukas's RFC and either change it or write
something based on it for weak typing only. If people here find it
useful I'll go ahead and do that.
Zeev
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