Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:109992
To: internals@lists.php.net
References: <171dee3baf3.bef5753260554.3262181919550021853@manuelcanga.dev>
 <CAKuGYLQ7s7Xbf1bHw83aDW0=2mNT9mkZ0XTHMz9t69EUGxvUyA@mail.gmail.com>
 <171e05b4ced.1041f31b5124598.4028595156690203917@manuelcanga.dev>
Message-ID: <10faa29f-f08f-a73e-b76d-683f5abbee86@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 4 May 2020 18:33:51 +0100
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/68.7.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <171e05b4ced.1041f31b5124598.4028595156690203917@manuelcanga.dev>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Language: en-GB
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Keep type of reference params
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Tommins)

On 04/05/2020 16:43, Manuel Canga wrote:
> I think I’d be positive of adding `inout` keyword in order to:
>
> - Check type of out is equal to type of param( like example of my first email ).
> - Avoid modifying caller var value when the function throws an exception


Another huge advantage of adding inout parameters is that we could make 
it mandatory to mark at the call-site, and get the advantages of this 
RFC with less of the compatibility hassle of changing the way references 
work: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/explicit_send_by_ref

We'd still need to figure out how to smoothly transition built-in 
functions to use inout rather than by-ref parameters; but then we 
already have magic "prefer-ref" in internal functions, so maybe we could 
come up with some kind of "prefer-inout".


Regards,

-- 
Rowan Tommins (né Collins)
[IMSoP]