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Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 09:11:03 -0600
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Subject: Renaming type-hints to something else?
From: levim@php.net (Levi Morrison)

Dear list,

I've always been bothered by the fact that we call type declarations
'hints', as if they aren't enforced. They have always been enforced
and we don't have an option to turn them off.

I'm wondering if we want to move away from that name to something
else. I have two RFCs already that deal with types and need to know if
there would be support for changing it, because that influences
internal and external names.

Here's an example: the return types RFC creates a struct that is
currently called `zend_type_decl`. This struct is only used for return
types at present, but could be unified with arginfo to work with
parameter type declarations as well. I'd prefer not to call it
`zend_type_hint` or `zend_typehint`, because they aren't 'hints'.

This also manifests itself to users because of reflection as well.

HHVM internally calls them TypeAnnotations, but since we've had RFC
proposals about something "annotations" which are something else I'd
prefer to stay away from that.

Can anyone come up with a better name than `hints`? Maybe `type
declarations`? Or should we just stick with `hints`?

What do you guys think?