Hi PHP-fellows
or whoever reads this…

I’m a Belgian PHP addict and feel I’ve got a suggestion that might be of
interest for PHP7.
I’d more than glad to write it down completely in an RFC if you grant me
access, otherwise, maybe someone can do it.
My username is *dgoosens*.

I feel, a natural evolution of the scalar type hinting would be the
possibility to type hint arrays as well…
That means, not the array itself, obviously, but the items that are in the
array.

Right now we have

array $foo = array();

What I’d like to see is something like this:

string[] $foo = array(); // an array that can only contain
stringsarray[string[]] $foo = array(); // an array that can only
contain arrays that contain stringsBar[] $foo = array(); // an array
that can only contain instances of Bar

There probably are some side effects to this and maybe I’m not aware enough
about PHP’s internals, but I think this implementation would have a series
of benefits…

*1. function attributes type hinting*

public function bar(string[] $foo = array()){
    /*    No need to validate the data in $foo as we already know that
it will only contain strings    */}

*2. class attributes*

class foo
{
    public $foo = string[];
}
$bar = new foo();$bar->foo[] = 'only strings are allowed here';

etc. etc.

I feel this would be a very nice improvement in PHP…

Thanks

dgoosens

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