RE: [PHP-DEV] PHP Philosophy (was RE: [PHP-DEV] Scalar type hinting)

> From: Richard Lynch [mailto:ceo@l-i-e.com] > On Wed, February 29, 2012 7:16 pm, John Crenshaw wrote: > > I'm beginning to think that the type hinting question is too closely > > related to the dirty secrets of type juggling to resolve them > > separately. You may have to either discard consistency, or else fix > > the problem of silent bizarre conversions at the same time ('foo'==0, > > '123abc'=123). Fixing the conversions is a BC break though. > > [short version] > One man's "fixing" is another man's "feature" :-) > > Old hands can now hit delete while I wax philosophical. The operative word was "silent". The actual behavior is fine, but the silence is unexpected. For example, PHP happily accepts substr('foo', 'bar') with no complaint at all. From a purely philosophical perspective I think almost everyone would expect *at least* a strict notice. On a practical level, we have a major barrier and we'll have to decide how to handle it. As I see it we could do one of the following: 1. Discard consistency (!!) 2. Try to convince people to make these bizarre conversions not silent (BC break) 3. Try to find a creative solution to be consistent without changing anything about the conversion behavior. (I'm not seeing a way to do this one, unless we redefine "consistent".) John Crenshaw Priacta, Inc.