Re: [RFC] Scalar Type Hints

On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 2:27 PM, Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me> wrote: > > Please read the RFC (and specification patch, if you wish) and tell me your thoughts. > My thoughts as a long time (non-voting) PHP user: I'd much prefer if they were strict types. I have a bias toward this because I prefer to be as strict as possible. It's not hard to type my_func((int) $_GET['foo']) if I want easy conversion. This explicit cast serves as a reminder that I'm being sloppy. I can quickly scan and see if there are parts of my code that are more prone to bugs. But I'm not opposed to the RFC. I think it's *way* better than nothing, and I understand the arguments in its favor. My one complaint: I don't like that it emits a notice. I treat notices as broken code, and if it's proper to say (int) "7 things", then it ought to be proper to send that into a function. With notices being a possibility, I'll need to manually add (int) in front of everything ... at which point, we might as well have strict types. (Off-topic and different RFC, but I think having return types that auto-cast is weird, which is another reason I'd prefer strict types all around.) Finally, I'm not sure that implementing both (strict / type juggling) with different syntax is a good idea. I think I'd prefer one or the other. I don't really want to keep track as a user of many composer libs (etc) which authors decided I need to use strict types. Because I wouldn't want to have two different styles of code depending on the library I'm using, I'd end up again going back to assuming everything was a strict type. -- Matthew Leverton