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

Ford, Mike wrote (on 15/07/2014):

Oh, goodness, deary me -- this sounded so familiar I just had to do some delving and hey presto! I refer you to:http://marc.info/?l=php-internals&m=124655821522388 (...which, interestingly, even predates Zeev's 2010 claim, and I believe may have taken inspiration from yet earlier suggestions back around 2006!!)

Ooh, skimming that, I see suggestions for prefixes and suffixes to represent types of cast (or hint). That fits nicely with my thoughts on making "strict cast" a first-class citizen of the language, rather than isolating it to function signatures, e.g.: $foo = 'abc'; $foo = (int)$foo; // OK, evaluates to int(0) $foo = 'abc'; $foo = (int!)$foo; // ERROR $foo = '42'; $foo = (int!)$foo; // OK, evaluates to int(42)