Re: feature proposal: string types

> > IMHO the syntax you suggest is a bit terse, what about this instead: > > > > echo url"http://$host:$port/$path"; > > Looks perlish to me, I'd rather see a casting thing like this then: > > echo (url) "http://$host:$port/$path"; I was originally thinking about casting too, but although I'm sure it could be done, I don't think it's good to have casting(-like) syntax have the effect I proposed. You see, what I proposed is having a different behaviour already on inserting the variables ($host, $port and $path in the above example would be converted to url string type) into the string. With casting, the behaviour would be to first make a normal string, and then cast it as a whole, losing the information about the inserted variables. > but then you just could make it a function (or a language construct): > > echo url("http://$host:$port/$path"); Same argument against a function; could be a language construct, but I think it would be less intuitive - it would look like you first make a normal string and then convert it, which is not the case in my proposal. > but this can break BC as those functions may be in use in scripts. Yeah, unless we give them really long and ugly names. Not sure if that's a good idea, though. ;-) > > But I would like to extend the idea beyond reformatting inserted > > strings. For example, for easy soap/xmlrpc serialization, being able to > > tag a value as a date or some other soap/xmlrpc-specific type is very > > useful. > > It might, but remember that PHP is not a strong typed language; somehow it > feels like this is not just PHP then. PHP would not become a strong typed language. It would be... perhaps optionally sub-typed? :-) I wouldn't worry about this. Vaclav Dvorak (vdhome@idas.cz) http://nebuchadnezzar.zion.cz/