Re: Syntactical change to Scalar Type Hints RFC

On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 6:30 AM, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com> wrote: > On 08/02/2015 20:33, Zeev Suraski wrote: >> >> FWIW, while I think strict types - stricter than even strict languages - >> don't belong in PHP, this syntax is clearly a step up from declare(), >> which >> was definitely not intended for this purpose. > > > I'm kind of intrigued what purpose it *was* intended for. I've always found > it a rather odd part of the language, but this seems as logical a use for it > as any. > > For years, it had exactly one "execution directive", which worked in concert > with a runtime event handler (ticks=N + register_tick_function). In PHP 5.3, > a completely unrelated directive was added, to specify the encoding of the > file (something that more obviously has to be detected by the compiler). > > Was there an original idea of what it would be used for that never came to > fruition? Or is there something I'm missing that connects "ticks" and > "encoding", but excludes "strict_types"? Both are being done at compile time and modify how a file is compiled. So no, I do not agree with "runtime" here, while one directive is being used at runtime. -- Pierre @pierrejoye | http://www.libgd.org