Re: Question about adding !function_identifier

On Fri, 5 Apr 2019 at 14:05, Robert Hickman <robehickman@gmail.com> wrote: > > I think you're misunderstanding the problem: it's not that the > *programmer* doesn't know the types, it's that the *analysis tool* doesn't > know them, because the programmer hasn't told it, and currently has no way > to tell it. > > > > If the static analyser was programmable, it would be possible to > provide it such information, within the scope of a single code base. > I'm not really sure what you're suggesting; the normal way to "program" a static analyzer is to add more and richer type annotations to your code, as in the over-the-top example I gave (in reality, the analyser can deduce some of the types, and the syntax needn't be quite that ugly). The problem is that PHP has a lot of features where there is currently no way to specify types (callbacks, iterators, etc), and some where it's essentially impossible to do so in a checkable way ($$foo, $foo->$bar, etc). I'm not saying it's not possible, it's just a considerable project to rewrite a dynamic language into a statically typed one, and at the moment Hack is much further into that project than PHP, partly because it has less concern about backwards compatibility. Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]