At 19:30 22/05/2010, Josh Davis wrote:
On 22 May 2010 17:04, Zeev Suraski <z...@zend.com> wrote:
> As one of the key people who designed PHP's type system I consider strict
> type checks completely alien to and counterintuitive in PHP and
am therefore
> pushing to implement 'weak' typing instead, in a way that's consistent and
> familiar to users.
I would normally refrain from posting on the dev list but as a "user"
I feel the need to make sure that my position isn't misrepresented, so
here it is.
I think that users' opinion about language direction is very
important, so thanks for writing.
As you wrote, you worked on PHP's _type system_ which is dynamic,
really cool, juggles strings with ints and what not. However, the
topic here is the _type hinting system_.
Well I actually wrote PHP's type hinting system too :) And it's no
coincidence there are no type hints for scalars, and that stems
directly from PHP's type system. As a part of introducing type hints
to PHP back in 2003, there was a discussion about whether or not to
add scalar type hints. Consensus was against it, and actually as a
part of the agreement to add type hints to PHP - we agreed we'll
'never' introduce scalar type hints because of the baggage and
inconsistency it comes with. Never is not a very long time when it
comes to software though...
As far as I know, there's no
"weak" type hinting; if a method signature hints for an array and is
given an integer, it throws a catchable fatal error. Therefore, as a
user, what I am familiar to is a strict _type hinting system_.
Anything else would feel inconsistent to me.
That's true, but then, there's also no way to auto-convert class Foo
to class Bar - while there is a way to auto-convert between scalar
types in many (if not most) cases.
Consider a simple example - class Child extends Parent {} strict
type hinting is the equivalent of not allowing an object of class
Child when a function expects an object of class Parent. Much like
Child is_a Parent, "123" is_a int.
Zeev
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