Re: [RFC] Return Type Declarations pre-vote follow-up

Minor issues first: First minor issue: you have a return type "self". This is an LSB type, > effectively the type of "new static". Levi, I remember discussing this with > you in IRC, but not the result of that discussion. What is the reason for > "self"? The Hack type system calls it "this", which I admit is a little > confusing since it is the type of more things than just the literal > variable "$this" ("new static" for example is also of type > "this"). But the > type "static" is much more consistent with the existing LSB language, i.e., > "new static". So is there any reason to call it "self" over > "static" or > "this"? > The type 'self' is not late bound, unlike 'static' and exists in the language elsewhere; I am not introducing a new keyword 'self' in this RFC. > Second minor issue: your reflection implementation is slightly different > from HHVM's. I'm told we call the method "getReturnTypeText", which returns > the hint text, or false if none exists. I don't know how strongly we feel > about this, but at the very least, I wanted to make sure you were aware > that you were definitely diverging from the existing implementation here, > and that it was done intentionally. (Also, I don't think you have any test > coverage of this feature?) All we did was copy the existing structure in Parameter type hints; this was done for consistency. Is there any particular reason Hack/HHVM chose to do something entirely different for return types in regards to reflection? I don't particularly like the way type information is handled in Reflection anyway.