Re: Deprecation ideas for PHP 8

> Le 23 janv. 2019 à 14:19, Girgias <george.banyard@gmail.com> a écrit : > > > > On Wed, 23 Jan 2019 at 09:19, Claude Pache <claude.pache@gmail.com> wrote: > >> >>> - settype >> >> AFAICS, there is no easy replacement for settype(). If the second argument >> is a string literal, you can use type coercion + assignment at the price of >> duplicating the occurrence of the first argument. If the second argument is >> not known at compile time, you have to resort to a switch statement or >> something similar. >> > > I did not consider that someone might want to set the type of a variable at > runtime because > I can not see any pratical usages for that, imho you change a variable type > into another one > because you want to work with that specific type. But it basically boils > down to the same issue > as with gettype that without it you need to do a switch statement to get > something similar. > > So, since you didn’t see, here are some practical usages of settype(): <?php function foo($bar) { // $bar is supposed to be either a string, or a list of strings settype($bar, 'array'); // ... } function qux($id) { if (!(is_int($id) || is_string($id) && ctype_digit($id))) throw new \TypeError; settype($id, 'int'); // ... } class Foo implements SeekableIterator { function seek(/* int */ $position): void { // NOTE: we cannot use int typehint here, because PHP7.1 requires mixed settype($position, 'int'); // ... } } ?> Here are a usage of settype() with a non-constant second parameter: Define a utility function that cast a value to a given type when it is not null: <?php function cast_opt($val, $type) { if ($val !== null) settype($val, $type); return $val; } $foo = cast_opt($bar, 'int') // equivalent to: $foo = $bar === null ? null : (int) $bar; ?> Sure, one can avoid settype() and do it the complicated way, but why? What is the issue with settype(), so that you want to deprecate it? —Claude