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Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2019 14:27:27 +0100
Message-ID: <CALKiJKo_-oA6B75yzK1U2a9L9zAiitE=nfygMC9oej9OfbF=OQ@mail.gmail.com>
To: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="0000000000005ad6120585c8737e"
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Question about adding !function_identifier
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

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On Fri, 5 Apr 2019 at 14:05, Robert Hickman <robehickman@gmail.com> wrote:

> > I think you're misunderstanding the problem: it's not that the
> *programmer* doesn't know the types, it's that the *analysis tool* doesn't
> know them, because the programmer hasn't told it, and currently has no way
> to tell it.
> >
>
> If the static analyser was programmable, it would be possible to
> provide it such information, within the scope of a single code base.
>


I'm not really sure what you're suggesting; the normal way to "program" a
static analyzer is to add more and richer type annotations to your code, as
in the over-the-top example I gave (in reality, the analyser can deduce
some of the types, and the syntax needn't be quite that ugly).

The problem is that PHP has a lot of features where there is currently no
way to specify types (callbacks, iterators, etc), and some where it's
essentially impossible to do so in a checkable way ($$foo, $foo->$bar, etc).

I'm not saying it's not possible, it's just a considerable project to
rewrite a dynamic language into a statically typed one, and at the moment
Hack is much further into that project than PHP, partly because it has less
concern about backwards compatibility.

Regards,
-- 
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]

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