Re: AW: [PHP-DEV] PDM Meeting Notes

Matthias Pigulla wrote:

2.10 Dynamic class inheritance

Can someone elaborate a little on what this is supposed to be ;)?

Also known as runtime inheritance, or late binding. It's not a new thing, we have it today. The discussion was about whether to have a way to disable this and force people to define their classes at the top-level of scripts and to define them in the correct order so all binding can be done at compile-time which is of course faster. The conclusion was that this could be done at the opcode cache level.

I had a discussion about this with a colleague recently. IMHO specifying construcor signature does not make sense at all in interfaces... What is that supposed to do at all? I mean - conceptually, what does it express?

Just like any other signature in an instance, it tells anything that implements the interface that it must have a constructor and that constructor must meet the definition in the interface. Useful for object factories. In most cases you don't want to force a specific constructor in which case you wouldn't specify it in the interface, but I see no reason why you shouldn't be allowed to specify it there if you want to.

As to type hinting, has there ever been a discussion about allowing string/int/... type hints? These could perform appropriate casts so you don't need to make such checks at the beginning of every method you write.

Yes, a lot of folks are strongly against going down that route. -Rasmus