On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 7:34 PM, Zeev Suraski <z...@zend.com> wrote:
> At 20:28 29/05/2010, Chris Stockton wrote:
>
> My biggest issue as a user is the fatal errors. Why are we blowing up on
>> something that should throw some kind of useful argument exception? I end up
>> in my applications using instanceof everywhere because their is important
>> cleanup to be done before the end of the request. For example I can't afford
>> for php to just blow up in our account setup script, we are reaching out to
>> multiple non-transactional external resources. Some of our long running
>> command line processes have the same issue. I am all for type hinting but
>> the fatal errors or "catchabale" fatal errors are just silly. Exceptions
>> make so much more sense to me.
>>
>
> IMHO we shouldn't be getting to any kind of fatal error/exception
> situation, which is why I like the idea of auto-conversion plus E_STRICT in
> the 'weird conversion' scenarios (the API function shouldn't care - it got
> what it asked for; The caller would get notified that he passed something
> that probably doesn't make sense).
> But as to why errors and not exceptions - we have a guideline that language
> constructs don't through exceptions. It's up to users whether they want to
> use exceptions or not.
>
>
> Zeev
>
>
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>
I'm thinking about the type hinting in php for a while, and there is my 2
cent about this.
As an API developer, I need a way, to easily force my input into a proper
type, with ease, without dataloss, and without code duplication.
As an API consumer, I don't want to bother much about my API calls, as long
as my passed arguments are in the accepted form(I don't want to
convert '123' into 123), and I don't want to create yet another custom error
handler, to fetch the potentially triggered errors, and I cannot allow, that
one unhandled catcable fatal error ruin my application.
So basically I need type jugling(weak type hinting) + exceptions instead of
catchable errors.
But I know that the core should't throw exceptions, so we can't go to that
direction.
What if we introduce a new spl interface, which propose auto boxing for the
scalar types + exceptions for the type missmatch.
I mean, if you call that class with scalar arguments, the scalar values will
be converted to the matching spl class instance.
This way, you could hint your types for the interface without forcing the
api consumer to bother to convert '123' to 123 before passing it to the
method.
But if the consumer passes '123abc' when I'm hinting SplInt, then it will
throw an InvalidArgumentException or such.
So for example:
class foo implements WeakTypeHinting{
public function bar(SplInt $baz){
return $baz++;
}
}
$foo = new foo;
echo $foo->bar(1);
// 2
echo $foo->bar('2');
// 3
echo $foo->bar('3a')
// InvalidArgumentException
Feel free to discuss.
Tyrael
