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Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 14:26:47 +0200
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To: Marcus Boerger <helly@php.net>
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Subject: Re: AW: [PHP-DEV] Method overloading by method signature
From: cschneid@cschneid.com (Christian Schneider)

Marcus Boerger wrote:
>   If you have such a patch you should definitively post it here so that we
> can hve a look. Most interesting to us is however the oerformance impact. As
> that was the main reason to go any further than adding return type hints.

Am I the only here who thinks that performance is not the major issue 
with this approach?

Method signatures lead to a different style of programming I personally 
wouldn't want to encourage in PHP.

I'm expecting some kind of "if you don't like it don't use it" answer 
but I wouldn't want to bloat the language for such a feature anyway.

Example:
It's too easy for someone to think it's a good idea to change
	function foo($x) { ... }
to something like
	function foo(string $x) { ... }
	function foo(int $x) { ... }
but this can lead to very subtle bugs as automatic type conversion can 
trick you into passing something different than you thought and hence 
could lead you to do
	foo(strval($x));
all over the place to not get any surprises. A Bad Thing(TM) IMHO.

Regards,
- Chris