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Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2015 14:06:20 +0000
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To: Jordi Boggiano <j.boggiano@seld.be>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Scalar Type Hints
From: ajf@ajf.me (Andrea Faulds)

Hey Jordi,

> On 2 Jan 2015, at 14:01, Jordi Boggiano <j.boggiano@seld.be> wrote:
>=20
> And I, on the other hand, disagree.
>=20
> Looking at it from an OSS maintainer perspective, introducing strict =
hints in code would be a huge BC break as I don't know how people use my =
code, nor if they validate/coerce their user input early or not. If I =
suddenly declare something as int and someone used to pass '5', they get =
an error. That would make adoption quite hard in OSS IMO if you don't =
want to bother people.
>=20
> With weak typing on the other hand, I get to remove tons of @param =
annotations which would be amazing, and I get additional safeties that =
*new* mis-uses (like passing an object in an arg expecting a string, =
which at the moment could not be type hinted) will be caught early in =
the future.
> Existing mis-uses probably don't exist much since they'd likely fail =
further down in the code execution already, but in case they don't =
they'd be caught too and that's a good thing since it makes people look =
at their buggy code.
> As for valid uses of the code, like the '5' above, it keeps working =
just fine because it is fine. It's not my call as a library author to =
decide whether the users of the lib should cast user inputs to ints or =
validate them or do nothing at all.

This is an excellent point which had never occurred to me before! Yes, =
weakly-typed hints like these are far less likely to break existing =
code. I should probably mention that in the RFC.

Thanks!
--
Andrea Faulds
http://ajf.me/