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Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:30:23 +0000
Message-ID: <b19eae4e0901181430t3889b897h2a26febfb10d5623@mail.gmail.com>
To: Nathan Rixham <nrixham@gmail.com>
Cc: Hannes Magnusson <hannes.magnusson@gmail.com>, Lukas Kahwe Smith <mls@pooteeweet.org>, 
	internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Really Need..
From: viroteck@viroteck.net (Robin Burchell)

On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 9:39 PM, Nathan Rixham <nrixham@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've reworded my original mail completely maybe this one will have more
> feedback (or not)
>
> question: Would anybody else like to see, or feel the need for, *optional*
> type hinting of variables and class properties in PHP?
>

I was involved on a thread on exactly this some weeks earlier. I (and
a few others, though I don't really remember specifics) would very
much appreciate the possibilities of proper code structure when
working with large teams that this could help provide :)

(As to your original proposal, multiple method signatures is something
I've come across a need for *occasionally*, though personally, I'm not
a big fan of the feature -- the one place I would like having it is
__construct().

Say, you've got an ORM class which is derived for usage:

class ORM
{
   public function __construct(string $sPK)
   {
        // Fetch and populate based on PK
   }
}

class Person extends ORM
{
   public function __construct(int $iID)
   {
        // Fetch and populate based on PK
        parent::__construct((string)$iID);
   }

   public function __construct(string $sNewName, string $sAddress)
   {
        parent::__insert(....);
   }
}

Yes, I realise that this can be done with retrieving arguments and the
like, but for such purposes it's not the neatest solution
syntactically.)