Re: Q on Primitives

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 2:40 PM, troels knak-nielsen <troelskn@gmail.com> wrote: > PHP is loosely typed. Adding typehints to primitives would change > this. The only reason that it is working with object types, is because > you can't automatically coerce object types anyway. > > -- > troels I'm not sure what you are getting at here, really: the suggested functionality is optional, and a new addition mean that it indeed will not have an effect on backwards compatibility. What was the purpose of your mail? I cannot furthermore see why providing the choice for people to strong-type when it suits their purposes as well as allowing weak typing when useful is such a bad thing. Indeed, I'd quite love for this mixture :) I agree that typing *can* be accomplished in other ways, e.g. instanceof and various other hacks, but they are then not enforcing it in a uniform and controlled manner as type hinting does, plus they are less elegant than providing it as an optional first class language feature.