Re: [RFC] Scalar Type Hints

Hey Adam, > On 31 Dec 2014, at 20:51, Adam Harvey <aharvey@php.net> wrote: > > At a first read through, this looks great, and much more in line with > what I'd like scalar type hints to look like. Nice job! Glad to hear that! > In terms of the open issues, here's what I think: > > 1. Aliases: I think we should support the same set of names as we > currently support for type casts[0] (excluding non-scalar types, > obviously) — this actually expands the list a little more, since there > are three (!) variants for floating point values, but I think it's > important to be consistent in all the places in the language where we > use "type" names. I had thought about this. I don’t really want to support multiple names for each type. I’m alright with allowing short and long forms (int/integer, bool/boolean), because it’s fairly obvious to users that they mean the same thing, and we don’t use either form consistently. However, I don’t like completely different type names like ‘long’, ‘double’ and ‘real’. Luckily, in master, we no longer use ‘long’ or ‘double’ in error messages, and I don’t think we’ve ever used ‘real’ anywhere outside of the cast operator. So, I don’t think it’d cause problems to not allow these as type hints. > 2. Prohibiting use in class names: I think this makes sense, otherwise > we'll be violating the principle of least surprise when somebody does > call a class Int. (Yes, namespacing might help here, but I think I'd > rather restrict it altogether rather than trying to come up with rules > around when you can call a class "int" and how you'd refer to it.) > > To bang another drum (and this shouldn't be responded to in this > thread, since we have another one going for this RFC): this sort of > change is why 5.7 is vital for migration — emitting deprecation > warnings for users calling classes by names that we'll be prohibiting > in PHP 7 is important, and will help our users migrate their code > bases. I hadn’t thought of that, but yes, having a deprecation notice for this in 5.7 would be a good idea. Thanks for your comments. -- Andrea Faulds http://ajf.me/