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To: Chris Stockton <chrisstocktonaz@gmail.com>
Cc: Stanislav Malyshev <stas@zend.com>, Felipe Pena <felipensp@gmail.com>,  internals@lists.php.net
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Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:11:48 -0400
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Strict type hints (parameter and return value)
From: sam@sambarrow.com (Sam Barrow)

On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 10:06 -0700, Chris Stockton wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 9:57 AM, Stanislav Malyshev <stas@zend.com> wrote:
> 
> > What's the use of such code? If $var is '1' and not 1, what's the use of
> > throwing an exception and having to handle it later (basically by failing
> > the task, since you don't know how to do foo() now) - instead of just doing
> > with that 1 what was intended for? There's no any difference between 1 and
> > '1' that can be important to anybody. Only difference is the way it is
> > represented in underlying bits in zvals, about which nobody should ever
> > care. That's like making function that would accept only arguments that has
> > 3'rd bit of pointer set to 1 and 5th bit set to 0, and reject all others. No
> > sane application should ever behave this way. Writing such function is just
> > plain wrong, it replaces the substance of programming with nitpicking over
> > the details that are not important. Whole phenomenon of dynamic languages
> > has grown on the principle of liberating people from caring for bits and
> > concentrate on substance, and now you try to drag the bits back in.
> > So every time you call foo you need try/catch? And that's supposed to be
> > _good_?
> 
> 
> Somebody missed the point...
> 
> Seeing how you work for zend I thought maybe you have used the zend
> framework = ) Sorry in my example I used "int" instead of "numeric", but my
> point is the same, grep in zend framework for is_bool.
> 
> It does what you are complaining about:
> 
> From: Zend_Pdf_Element_Numeric
>     public function __construct($val)
>     {
>         if ( !is_numeric($val) ) {
>             throw new Zend_Pdf_Exception('Argument must be numeric');
>         }
> 
>         $this->value   = $val;
>     }
> 
> That could be...
>     public function __construct(numeric $val)
>     {
>         $this->value   = $val;
>     }
> 
> So, let's re-visit my point of "less code bloat"....

Actually, is_numeric checks for strings that contain numeric values,
it's not the same as is_bool, is_int, is_float, etc, which check the
variable's type.

Your point is very valid for is_int and similar functions, just not
is_numeric(). I just did a grep on zend framework for is_int and there
were tons of results.