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To: Pierre <pierre.php@gmail.com>
Cc: Marcus Boerger <helly@php.net>, Gregory Beaver <greg@chiaraquartet.net>,  Alain Williams <addw@phcomp.co.uk>, internals Mailing List <internals@lists.php.net>
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Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2008 12:37:19 -0500
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] type hinting
From: robert@interjinn.com (Robert Cummings)

On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 18:23 +0100, Pierre wrote:
> On Jan 4, 2008 6:20 PM, Marcus Boerger <helly@php.net> wrote:
> > Hello Pierre,
> >
> >   we never accepted this as a pro argument. Infact we often saw the
> > necessaity to highlight something is optional to vote against it. We do this
> > for a reason. That is we only want to support mainstream features.
> 
> My point of view is that this feature should be a mainstream feature.
> To make it optional was to lower the issues for those who don't care
> about argument strictness. We did not give them this choice for the OO
> strictness.

IMHO, optionally inclusion of type hinting for functions/methods can
only be a boon to code quality and readability. IMHO when a type hint is
provided and a parameter doesn't match the type hint then I think a
fatal error should occur. This forces the user of the function that has
type hinting to ensure their data is of the correct type. This prevents
accidental wrong data conversion. However, I see the other side of the
coin too where automatic type conversion could be desirable also.
Perhaps a mixed solution would be viable?

<?php

function foo( require int $a, require string $b ){}

foo( '5', 'bleh' );  // <-- fatal error

?>

Contrast versus:

<?php

function foo( int $a, string $b ){}

foo( '5', 'bleh' );  // <-- no exception or error $a in foo() will
                     //     be type int (automatic conversion)

?>

Versus (still allowed default style):

<?php

function foo( $a, $b ){}

foo( '5', 'bleh' );  // <-- no exceptions or type conversions

?>

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Rob.
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