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

On 18 Jul 2014, at 14:09, Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me> wrote: > On 18 Jul 2014, at 06:02, Theodore Brown <theodorejb@outlook.com> wrote: > >> Another concern I have is in regard to the future. I'm looking forward to the >> possibility of specifying nullable types in a future version of PHP (see Levi >> Morrison's "Declaring Nullable Types" RFC: >> http://wiki.php.net/rfc/nullable_typehints). If the >> nullable types RFC is accepted, it would be highly disconcerting if scalar type >> annotations allowed null values regardless of whether a nullable marker is specified. > > The current proposed behaviour could be changed. At the moment, if a scalar type hint is > nullable, then it won’t cast NULL if it’s passed that value, but if it’s not nullable, then it > will cast it. > > Considering how this tends to only allow lossless casts, though, it might be worth > reconsidering this and just disallowing NULL altogether. It’s worth pointing out that NULL is > usually an error value, and you might get it from using an uninitialised variable or calling an > internal function with bad parameters. I’ve updated the RFC and patch to make int, string and double nullability work like the other types (bool already did). If the default value isn’t NULL, NULL isn’t accepted and you’ll get E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR. If the default value is NULL, NULL is accepted and will not be casted. This will likely lead to less bugs as NULL is a common error value, and it also makes the scalar type hints more consistent with the others. -- Andrea Faulds http://ajf.me/