At 23:44 26/05/2010, Davey Shafik wrote:
On May 26, 2010, at 3:08 PM, Zeev Suraski wrote:
> At 21:12 26/05/2010, Pierre Joye wrote:
>> As PHP's type system is seen as a big plus,
>> I have to say that many users consider it as a plus in the
>> implementation of a given method function or method. But the same
>> users ask to have something more strict for the methods signature. I
>> think it is a valid request and somehow makes sense too.
>
> I think that the proposed auto-converting
type hints answer this request quite well...
>
> Zeev
Do you propose to have a warning when the types
are a mis-match, similar to the
array->scalar conversion example from Gustavo? (strtoupper(array('ABC')))
If you have a warning or notice, that warns of
potential loss of data accuracy, then
I think I'd be OK with auto-converting.
Yep - that's exactly the idea.
Having said that, all other type hints are
strict, throwing a catchable fatal error consistency
for what is essentially the same syntax, is more important IMO.
In my opinion it's really a matter of whether the
value makes sense in its context or not. Much
like a function that requires an object of type X
will accept an object of type Y if Y extends from
X - because Y is a kind of X, "42" is a kind of
an int. It's true that no conversion is made in
the former case, but still - across 99.9% of PHP,
"42", 42 and 42.0 are the same thing.
Would it be possible to support two syntaxes:
function foo( (int) $bar) { } // auto-cast to int
function foo(int $bar) { } // require int
I would advise against it - IMHO having both
strict and auto-converting type hints means
having all of the issues of strict typing, and
making that worse by having similar confusing
syntaxes on top of it... In general I think
there should be an exceptionally good reason to
add core language syntax. Auto-converting type
hints would cater for the vast majority of real
world use cases. While I'm sure we can come up
with situations where you'd want a strict type
check, for those few cases - you could simply use
is_int() - no need to add a language-level support for it.
Zeev
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