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Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2008 19:03:01 +0200
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Message-ID: <200801031903.01980.tomi@cumulo.fi>
Subject: RE: Optional scalar type hinting
From: tomi@cumulo.fi (Tomi Kaistila)

Hello everyone

I figured I would bring my opinion in to support of Sam's request for a more 
complete type hinting feature. Namely I am interested in the support for 
hinting scalar types on function and method arguments and I am sure it is 
safe for me to say that I speak for a lot of people. Most people that I know 
find the current type hinting, while useful, ridiculous because it looks like 
the job was left unfinished for whatever abstract reason.

In my opinion type hinting should definitely be allowed for scalar values. As 
for return types, I am not so sure. So far I have found no use for such a 
feature in my own code, so I won't comment on it. If it is added, I welcome 
it for those who find it useful but if it is not added I will not loose sleep 
over it.

> I was thinking at something along the lines of objects also for instance:
> $i = new Integer(33); 
 After my own experiments with the subject I concur that while it can be made 
to work, it is not only a bad idea (for the reasons mentioned earlier) it is 
also redundant and just unnecessary. There is a lot better way to accomplish 
the same and that by allowing scalar values to be hinted. It is simpler, 
cleaner, and easier to implement.

> What if type hinting just generated an E_NOTICE. Nothing more for the
> time being.
 Changing it to E_NOTICE or E_STRICT defeats the purpose somewhat since if I 
write a piece of code that hints that the argument for a-whatever method 
needs to be an integer it seems useless if the user of my library can avoid 
the issue just by supressing lesser errors and those who do not need to write 
extensive error handling code to respond to this sort of error (if they 
indeed deem it necessary to do so).

While hinting is, and should remain, optional, when it is used it should be 
enforced. After all the user of my library has the option to dump it and go 
for another library that does not force types. That is the beauty of having 
options.

Tomi Kaistila
PHP Developer