I've stated my opinion on this, I'm going for standard hinting. Int
means int, not "1" or "one" or "1one". Bool means boolean true or false,
I don't see any difference in substance between 1 and "1".
not "true", 1, 0, "0", etc.
Same for boolean - I don't see any substantial difference between (int)0, (float)0 and (boolean)false and see no reason ever to make a function that distinguishes between those. Now, statically-typed compiled languages do it for the very good reason - it is very hard to implement such versatile API manually. It is infeasible to make all C function declared as foo(int i) to take char* instead and use atoi() or whatever it needs to be - and do it for each and every function.
That's exactly why scripting languages with loose typing were created - to allow programmers to get rid of these technicalities and work with substance of the values, not with bit representation of them. Now you come back and say - no, my function would accept (boolean)0 but would pretend it can not handle (int)0 because the bits in a type field of the variable are wrong. What could be the practical purpose of such dumbing-down? Getting all the stress of the programming in statically typed language without compile-time checking and safety as a compensation for the stress? Doesn't look as a good deal for me.
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Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829 MSN: stas@zend.com