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Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 17:41:41 +0300
Message-ID: <eab1ceea2084415d21736a69c4ac6fdc@mail.gmail.com>
To: Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: RE: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Scalar Type Hinting With Casts (re-opening)
From: zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrea Faulds [mailto:ajf@ajf.me]
> Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2014 5:34 PM
> To: Zeev Suraski
> Cc: Nikita Popov; PHP internals
> Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Scalar Type Hinting With Casts (re-opening)
>
>
> On 13 Jul 2014, at 15:31, Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> wrote:
>
> > I think this is a big step in the wrong direction to one of the most
> > common auto-conversion use cases out there (HTTP input variables).
> > See my note to Nikita...
> >
> > This RFC is a huge deal, I suggest we let more people voice their
> > opinion in before changing it in each direction :)
> >
> > Zeev
>
> Yes, I might have acted a little too quickly. However, I'm not sure
"12a" is such
> a common case. With the strict behaviour, foobar(" 12") and foobar("12")
still
> work, however foobar("12 ") unfortunately would not.

I don't think it's a common intentional case, but when writing code
defensively - you need to be prepared for whatever someone might through
at you...  Say I have a form that accepts 'age', and I expect users to
type in their age.  As one that develops the backend, it's great if I can
simply stick an 'int' in the function signature that deals with this
$_GET['age'], and know that whatever the user typed in - it would turn it
to the most sane integer value.  In other words, if someone types in '12a'
(by mistake or intentionally), I think it's a very sane behavior to just
treat it as 12, as opposed to forcing me (the developer) to write error
handling code with a try/catch block, and a fairly hairy try/catch block
too.  Your example of "12 " (that I didn't even think about before) is an
even a more likely scenario, but I think there's no strong reason not to
allow both.

Zeev