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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Scalar Type Hinting With Casts (re-opening)
From: smalyshev@sugarcrm.com (Stas Malyshev)

Hi!

> The point of this RFC is to strike a compromise that is generally
> useful rather than helping one specific use case (strict hints) or
> another (casts).

What you call "compromise" is the inconsistency - it's not strict
typing, it's not weak typing, it's half that and half this without any
apparent principle uniting them but arbitrarily constructed table, to
which anybody using it would have to constantly refer to figure out why
their code is breaking. I'm sure you carefully thought about each and
every cell in that table, but that does not make it any better for the
user - in fact, it makes it worse, since absent the obvious uniting
principle it means each time the user encounters it it has to
reconstruct the long and laborious thought process anew or just learn
the whole table by hard. It is not a good design. Good design is where
you can predict what the language would do without remembering a bunch
of exceptions that are just so.

Even worse, it does not match what other functions are doing and what
other type conversions are doing. It's like a "compromise" of cutting
the baby in half - much worse than any of the original proposals. Only
in the case of Solomon it was a trick, you on the other side propose it
as a serious and preferable solution. This kind of "compromise" is not a
positive thing, but a negative.
-- 
Stanislav Malyshev, Software Architect
SugarCRM: http://www.sugarcrm.com/