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Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 22:14:08 +0200
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Subject: RE: [PHP-DEV] Introducing "Array Of" RFC
From: narf@devilix.net (Andrey Andreev)

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Am I the only one who finds both proposed syntaxes somewhat confusing?

The originally proposed 'Bar[]' simply looks strange.

HHVM's introduces even more "special characters" (<, >, ?) to parse, looks
a bit like a regular expression and it was even already mentioned that it's
"imported" from C++ ... PHP is not C++, and why should it be?

So, how about this:

  Array[Bar] $a - $a is array containing only instances of Bar
  Array[Bar|null] $a - $a is array containing Bar instances or nulls
  Array[Bar] $a = null - $a is either null or array containing only
instances of Bar
  Array[Bar|null] $a = null - above, but the array can contain nulls

It's easily readable and everybody should be able to recognize what this
thing does even without prior knowledge.

Hell, why not Array[Foo|Bar|stdClass|whocares] ?

Or even (at a later stage):

  Array[]["key1", "key2"]

... which would hint for a numeric index array containing associative
arrays that in turn must have the defined keys. This is indeed a bit crazy,
but possible to add in the future without BC breaks. You could even shove
scalar typehints in there as soon as they are implemented.

Cheers.
Andrey.

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