Re: Return Type Hinting for Methods RFC

On Thu, 22 Dec 2011, Will Fitch wrote: > Sent from my iPad > On Dec 22, 2011, at 5:51 PM, "Ángel González" <keisial@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Your examples only show class methods with visibility qualifyiers, and > > looking at the changes to zend_language_parser.y > > it seems as if would only be available for methods. Wouldn't return > > hints be available for plain functions? > > Right now, it's only available for methods. Personally, I'm not a fan > of return types for functions. Adding this for functions in its form > today will also introduce shift/reduce issues. IMO, it should work for normal functions too. > > In functional programming, it is common to return nullable types: > > returns an instance of class Foo or null, an array or false, etc. > > > > This is supported in normal arguments with the "= null" hint, and I > > think there should be something equivalent for return types. > > Does the proposed implementation allow null everywhere? (there's an > > example of returning null from a return hint of array) > > That seems wrong to me. Unless there's a way to make it strict (eg. > > array! for only arrays). > > Most modern languages allow returning null in any case. This is a hail > Mary in the event something happens, but throwing an exception is > inappropriate. I see no reason to diverge from that. I tend to agree with that one. cheers, Derick -- http://derickrethans.nl | http://xdebug.org Like Xdebug? Consider a donation: http://xdebug.org/donate.php twitter: @derickr and @xdebug