Numeric Type

Hello Internals, I'd like to know what would be people's feelings towards having a numeric type. I remember reading the nullable casting RFC ( https://wiki.php.net/rfc/nullable-casting) and it's discussion ( https://externals.io/message/105122). Although I would very much prefer to have nullable casting, it seems to be a bit controversial and perhaps Numeric Type could be a middle ground solution. The primary intent would be to safely pass around input that usually comes from HTTP, CI or Database. Whenever interacting with these data providers, string is a common format. is_int will not return true for integer values that are string, instead we need to rely on is_numeric. Similarly, I think we could benefit from having foo(?numeric $value) as a type-safe mechanism to transfer data around without having to forcefully check for numeric value before casting. If we simply (int) $value, we may end up casting null to 0. Type-hitting ?numeric could be a compromise. ``` foo(?int $number); foo($_GET['param']); // TypeError: foo() expects int or null, string given foo((int) $_GET['param']); // null becomes 0 foo($_GET['param'] ? (int) $_GET['param'] : null); // expected behavior bar(?numeric $number); bar($_GET['param']); // would work with any value that passes is_numeric() ``` I also think this approach have a benefit over PHP 8 Union Type (int|string) because is_numeric() does not return true for string values and for consistency the numeric type-hint would behave similarly. Thoughts? -- Marco Aurélio Deleu