RE: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Scalar Type Hinting With Casts (re-opening)

> -----Original Message----- > From: Andrea Faulds [mailto:ajf@ajf.me] > Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2014 5:34 PM > To: Zeev Suraski > Cc: Nikita Popov; PHP internals > Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Scalar Type Hinting With Casts (re-opening) > > > On 13 Jul 2014, at 15:31, Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> wrote: > > > I think this is a big step in the wrong direction to one of the most > > common auto-conversion use cases out there (HTTP input variables). > > See my note to Nikita... > > > > This RFC is a huge deal, I suggest we let more people voice their > > opinion in before changing it in each direction :) > > > > Zeev > > Yes, I might have acted a little too quickly. However, I'm not sure "12a" is such > a common case. With the strict behaviour, foobar(" 12") and foobar("12") still > work, however foobar("12 ") unfortunately would not. I don't think it's a common intentional case, but when writing code defensively - you need to be prepared for whatever someone might through at you... Say I have a form that accepts 'age', and I expect users to type in their age. As one that develops the backend, it's great if I can simply stick an 'int' in the function signature that deals with this $_GET['age'], and know that whatever the user typed in - it would turn it to the most sane integer value. In other words, if someone types in '12a' (by mistake or intentionally), I think it's a very sane behavior to just treat it as 12, as opposed to forcing me (the developer) to write error handling code with a try/catch block, and a fairly hairy try/catch block too. Your example of "12 " (that I didn't even think about before) is an even a more likely scenario, but I think there's no strong reason not to allow both. Zeev