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

On 15 Jul 2014, at 13:50, Alain Williams <addw@phcomp.co.uk> wrote: >> It will blow up with a fat E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR. >> But this won't hold back the library authors from using it, which means >> that the consumers of those libs has to start coding defensively, and make >> sure that the variable holding the value 123 is an integer and not a float >> or a string, because that will blow up something. > > They will have it blow up when it first runs, fix the bug (add a cast or > something) and move on. I think that it is an insult to PHP coders to assume > that they will not be able to cope. They will scratch their heads the first time > that it happens to them, google/... & learn. > > The benefit of this is fewer issues in libraries. It may also help by catching > user/coder errors earlier and so make their life easier. > > There is trade off bet As has been pointed out previously, this isn’t good. People will simply do this just to fix an error: foobar((int)$_GET[‘thing’]); However, an explicit cast can *never fail*. It will always return something, whether it makes sense or not. This is simply going to lead to buggy software. On the other hand, this RFC proposes a set of type hint casts which have stricter rules than an explicit cast, and also somewhat stricter than zend_parse_parameters, meaning that people can safely do $_GET[‘thing’] and it’ll work, but if a nonsensical value is passed in, the program will error as it should. -- Andrea Faulds http://ajf.me/