Re: [RFC] Scalar Type Hinting With Casts (re-opening)

On 13/07/2014 16:56, Andrea Faulds wrote:

Somewhat off-topic, but maybe we should make StdClass be the actual base class? I mean, it’s already used as a generic object, and you could then put StdClass as a type hint if you’re using an object as a key/value store but want to allow sophisticated objects to be passed. Also, we don’t have a mechanism to cast between classes mostly because we don’t need it; if Bar extends Foo and a function takes a Foo, it can also take a Bar.

It's an interesting thought, but we currently have the object keyword for that particular use case. In some languages, having a base object is useful because functionality can be defined there, but PHP provides no way of altering existing classes, limiting that use too. Personally, I'm too much of a fan of PHP's arrays to bother with stdClass at all; if you want to future-proof things, it's not that hard to write placeholders ready for later implementation: class MyValueObject {

    /** @todo Declare public properties */

} or: interface UsefulObject {

    /** @todo Not sure what to enforce yet */

} Allowing an array to specific-class cast would be a useful short-hand initialiser in that case (although you'd then want an __castFromArray override when you did flesh out the class): $foo = (MyValueObject)['id' => 42, 'name' => 'The Answer']; -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]