Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:44829
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain zend.com designates 212.25.124.185 as permitted sender)
Message-ID: <4A547DCB.9090003@zend.com>
Date: Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:06:51 +0400
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.21 (X11/20090320)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Ilia Alshanetsky <ilia@prohost.org>
CC: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
References: <2D0F5226-EBCA-4B45-BF01-8ED1C643976C@prohost.org>
In-Reply-To: <2D0F5226-EBCA-4B45-BF01-8ED1C643976C@prohost.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Type hinting/casting request for vote
From: dmitry@zend.com (Dmitry Stogov)

1) The patch introduce several new reserved words (resource, numeric, 
scalar, object). This may break existing applications which use these 
names as function or class names.

2) The patch should define something like ZEND_ARG_TYPE_INFO()

3) do we really need IS_CLASS constant?

4) arg_info->array_type_hint should be probably changed into 
arg_info->type_hint. May be it's better to use bitset mask for it.
Then we won't need IS_SCALAR and IS_NUMERIC as well and 
arg_info->allow_null field.

Otherwise the patch looks good, but note that for now it only slowdowns 
execution a bit because of addition checks. I hope, it'll be possible to 
use these hints in the future to generate more optimal code.

+1 for php6 after improvements

Thanks. Dmitry.


Ilia Alshanetsky wrote:
> Last week or so there was a fairly detailed discussion on the internals 
> list regarding type hinting based on my original patch. Since then the 
> patch has been revised to address the major concerns that were 
> identified (breakage of binary compatibility) as well extended with 
> additional functionality (object hint, type casting, reflection support, 
> etc...).
> 
> The final patch is available here: http://ilia.ws/patch/type_hint_53_v2.txt
> The test suit is available here: http://ia.gd/patch/type_hint_tests.tar.bz2
> 
> I would like to ask all developers to voice their opinions of whether it 
> makes sense to add this to 5.3 or to throw it away (either one is fine 
> btw). To keep the process simple & flamewar free, please restrict 
> yourself to +/- (1/0), next week monday I'll run a tally of the votes 
> and based on the result we can determine how to proceed further.
> 
> Ilia
>