Re: [RFC] Scalar Type Hints

Hey Jordi, > On 2 Jan 2015, at 14:01, Jordi Boggiano <j.boggiano@seld.be> wrote: > > And I, on the other hand, disagree. > > Looking at it from an OSS maintainer perspective, introducing strict hints in code would be a > huge BC break as I don't know how people use my code, nor if they validate/coerce their user > input early or not. If I suddenly declare something as int and someone used to pass '5', > they get an error. That would make adoption quite hard in OSS IMO if you don't want to bother > people. > > With weak typing on the other hand, I get to remove tons of @param annotations which would be > amazing, and I get additional safeties that *new* mis-uses (like passing an object in an arg > expecting a string, which at the moment could not be type hinted) will be caught early in the > future. > Existing mis-uses probably don't exist much since they'd likely fail further down in > the code execution already, but in case they don't they'd be caught too and that's a > good thing since it makes people look at their buggy code. > As for valid uses of the code, like the '5' above, it keeps working just fine because > it is fine. It's not my call as a library author to decide whether the users of the lib should > cast user inputs to ints or validate them or do nothing at all. This is an excellent point which had never occurred to me before! Yes, weakly-typed hints like these are far less likely to break existing code. I should probably mention that in the RFC. Thanks! -- Andrea Faulds http://ajf.me/