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Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2012 09:46:18 +0000
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Scalar Type Intentions
From: lester@lsces.co.uk (Lester Caine)

Pierre Joye wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Sebastian Bergmann<sebastian@php.net>  wrote:
>   usually does not work.
>> >
>> >    2) What you want to achieve is already possible through docblocks.
> I am not saying that I like the idea of scalar type arguments, but you
> keep saying that docblocks solve such issue. They are totally
> unrelated to what is discussed here, they are documentations. They
> have nothing to do with runtime information (The same concept applied
> to the annotations, if you remember it).

But one of the reasons given for wanting this is as simple documentation?

Does providing more checks at runtime actually add anything when in many cases 
we already need to check for valid input anyway. I can't help thinking that in 
many cases people proposing this are working on a basis that the variables they 
are passing are fully nailed down as to what is in them? When in practice we are 
not passing well typed variables around - until they have been checked.

It would be interesting to establish just how many developers already use IDE's 
which provide all of this hinting and more important detailed error checking 
which does not rely on adding anything more to the runtime engine. I kill most 
of these problems before the scripts ever get run anyway ...

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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