Re: type hinting

From: Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:58:45 +0000
Subject: Re: type hinting
References: 1 2 3  Groups: php.internals 
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> Ok, but a scalar becomes useful for a couple of important things. > Scalars are all displayable values, that can be stored in a db, > outputted, etc. The scalar type hint prevents errors related to objects, > resources, and arrays attempting to be stored in the db or echoed. True, but honestly I do not see a whole lot of use for this. In a word, it is very limited. _Too_ limited to be truly useful in my opinion. It is simple statistics; there is more need for specific types than scalars in general, when using type hinting. I do agree that it is a good idea to allow for type hinting scalars in general, but it should not be considered a solution. It is more like a comfortable add-on. And to be frank, this really feels like a secondary price (bronze at most). If pressed I would go bold say that this really feels like a screw. A way of saying that we went out of our way to fix this feature that was limited by adding a seemingly useful attribute to it, but in the end still leaving the feature limited and not really fixing anything. Tomi Kaistila PHP Developer

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