Re: RFC: Type hinting revisited for PHP 5.3

Hi Ilia, Your patch doesn't support a "null" (or maybe it should be called "unset") type check. Its uses would be rare, but I think it should be present for completeness. Thanks, Paul On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 5:59 PM, Ilia Alshanetsky<ilia@prohost.org> wrote: > There has been quite a bit of discussion on this list, IRC, developer > meetings, etc... about introduction of type hinting to PHP. Most people > appear to think that this would be a good idea, but there is a reason why it > is not in PHP already. The main source of conflict appears to be that in > some cases typical type hinting is just too strict for PHP's typeless nature > (most people expect that "1" == 1, while int type hint would definitely > reject string "1").  Personally, I disagree with that opinion, but I can > understand people who raise that issue. At work we've been using PHP 5.2 > with type hinting for nearly 2 years now with great success, it makes code > much easier to read and understand and the security benefit of type hinting > is not to be under valued. In many cases type hinting can present a last > line of defense against unexpected input for numeric fields, which are > typically abused to do SQL injection. > > I've taken a few hours this morning to port my 5.2 type hinting patch to > 5.3. In recognition of a need for a more 'flexible' numeric type I've > introduced (numeric) type hint that would allow bool/int/float data types as > well as a string containing a numeric entity as identified by > is_numeric_string(). For completion i've also added (scalar) data type that > will allow any scalar data element. > > The patch is available here: > http://ia.gd/patch/type_hint_53.txt > > It should be noted that this patch is fully compatible with opcode caches > and and requires no changes on the part of an opcode cache such as APC to > work. > > My hope is that the latest changes will allow this to become a standard part > of PHP. > > Ilia Alshanetsky > > P.S. > > It should be noted that this is not the first idea for type hints, that > credit goes to Hannes Magnusson who had posted a similar patch on the > internals list back in 2006. Also, back in 2008 Felipe Pena wrote a type > hinting patch for PHP that is available on wiki.php.net. > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > -- Paul Biggar paul.biggar@gmail.com