At 01:47 11/08/2010, Stas Malyshev wrote:
Hi!
For the record: I consider the current implementation as (one of) the
biggest mistakes in the last ten years.
I agree completely. The fact that obvious absence of consensus is
ignored and we are releasing feature that clearly has no consensus
behind it as a part of an official release - when we have killed
much lesser things for much lesser reasons - I think it is a very
bad development.
I agree completely too.
We've also had quite a lengthy discussion on this topic, and there
was more support for 'weak' typing then there was for strict typing.
The response to Johannes's blog also don't leave much room for
speculation regarding what the community at large thinks.
Facts:
- When we introduced type hints, one of the 'conditions' were that
we'll never, ever have type hints for scalars - for many different
reasons - the strongest of which it simply doesn't fit PHP's theme.
- We managed to come up with an alternative solution, in the form of
auto-converting type hints for scalars, which does in fact fit PHP's
theme perfectly.
- I suggested we actually take the opportunity to slightly modify
PHP's conversion rules in esoteric cases, where our historical
decision is probably not the right one (e.g., silently converting
"abc" into 0 in case of integer context - instead emit a new E_TYPE
warning that would be off by default).
My view in terms of preferences:
#1 - Auto-converting type hints + minor changes to PHP's conversion rules
#2 - Auto-converting type hints
#3 - Doing nothing
#inf - Introducing strict typing into PHP (current trunk status)
As Stas said - there's clearly anything but consensus around strict
typing, so our 'default' in case we can't reach agreement is #3 - the
status quo. As everyone told me when this feature was committed to
trunk - "it doesn't mean anything, it's just trunk". Let's stand
behind that statement and revert it.
Strict typing should go away before any 'official' package comes out
of php.net.
Zeev
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