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Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:35:18 -0500
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RE: Optional scalar type hinting
From: sam@sambarrow.com (Sam Barrow)

On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 02:01 +0000, Steph wrote:
> > I'm just a php developer who didn't agree with the rules on type
> > hinting.
> 
> ... or superglobals, or multiple class inheritance rules. Why PHP? What did 
> we do? :\
> 
> More seriously (because I don't think this has a hope in hell of getting in, 
> for all the reasons Stas is trying to explain) - I'm bothered because I idly 
> went to check you out when you first turned up and couldn't find any record 
> of your existence prior to your appearance on internals@. Even the site 
> name's booked by proxy. Are you the Brackets man?
> 

I just like PHP enough that rather than switch languages, I would like
to attempt to make PHP better. I've only been working with the PHP
source since November and I'm 19 so I haven't been around for many prior
contributions to PHP; that's probably why you haven't heard of me. I
started messing with the source and about a week later I had the type
hinting and superglobal patches done, and I joined internals.

I completely understand the disadvantages to multiple inheritance so
I've kind of dropped that, I support custom superglobals but I can
understand why they are unwanted, but scalar type hinting I think should
be in PHP. I have written all 3 of these patches but this is the one I'm
pushing for mostly. I'm using the superglobal patch for my own
development, and I have multiple inheritance working, but I don't want
to have to rewrite the patch every time php changes.

And these reasons you're talking about that Stas brought up, I don't see
any reasons besides the fact that it may confuse newcomers and it's too
"javaish". Performance is not an issue here, especially for those who
don't use type hinting. For those who don't want to use it they don't
have to because it's optional.

Any other arguments can be countered by the fact that if type hinting is
not proper in the situation, don't use it. If you want to, then use it.
Everybody wins. Plus the majority on here seems to agree with me.

Type hinting is already in PHP. It's been in PHP. Why not add a couple
of useful types? I don't see any debate here.