Re: Re: [Zend Engine 2] Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: [Zend Engine 2] Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: [Zend Engine 2] Type hints revisited [IllegalArgumentException
instead of E_ERROR]

At 10:57 AM 3/28/2003 -0500, Sterling Hughes wrote:

On Fri, 2003-03-28 at 10:52, Andi Gutmans wrote: At 03:56 PM 3/28/2003 +0100, Sebastian Bergmann wrote:

Andi Gutmans wrote:

OK so maybe we should go ahead and nuke it and save us the argument.

Please, no.

The main problem is that people are getting carried away and instead of looking at the big step forward the OOP model has done since PHP 4 and how useful it will be, they are thinking of how much is left to change PHP into Java. i.e. it is going to be a never-ending story until PHP successfully compiles Java code (from now on I'll use the term deltaJava as the delta between Java and PHP). Therefore, I prefer nuking what I consider a cute nice-to-have feature which I don't consider critical, instead of making the extra step and waiting for the next complaint found about a feature which exists in deltaJava. I personally agree. I think that type-hints are nice, but will ultimately be too much a pita if the error can not be recovered from. One thing, just a wild, and half-baked idea, but why not have a E_MAKE_US_ALL_HAPPY, error level, that doesn't call the current function (because types are wrong, but doesn't halt script execution either. My concern with typehints is two-fold: 1) It forces pointless type-conformity in the majority of PHP code. It does have some good uses (SOAP for example), but I fear it will be overused by OO-zealots, who still haven't gotten that PHP isn't Java - and that's a *GOOD* thing. 2) It throws an E_ERROR. If this is going to be a runtime feature, I want to have someway to recover from it. Perhaps it can limit the function from being called, but not kill script execution?

Changing PHP's behavior with a different error level is only a tad bit better than adding an INI directive. In general I'd like the core language to behave the same no matter what error level or INI settings. I say nuke type-hints and let the purists use instanceof. Andi