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Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2015 16:47:49 +0000
Message-ID: <CAKxcST-2qstp4hP18C2oNiMApog9dz89ZgSOmTdmGW5Geh04pA@mail.gmail.com>
To: Dmitry Stogov <dmitry@zend.com>
Cc: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>, Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me>, 
	Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=001a11c13bf2ee0cb5050e1db6d7
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] What do we need strict scalar type hints for?
From: dragoonis@gmail.com (Paul Dragoonis)

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Hi Dmitry,

It's preferred to have flexible scalars, that way we can interchange
between a numerical string or an integer.

Over defining on such things loses the powerfulness of PHP. So scalar
typehints are detrimental rather than useful. Saying something is a scalar
or not, is useful however! :)

A use case would be where scalar type hints are detrimental are:

I implement an API that returns integers for entity ids, like 2,3,4,5,6.
and my web-frontend handles this fine because it's a scalar. Then, you want
to convert entity ids to  UUID. This would break your entire web frontend
application since it's no longer "integer" whereas the concept of $id is
good enough.

Did this make sense?

TL;DR - I am against such proposals.

Many thanks,
Paul





On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 9:12 AM, Dmitry Stogov <dmitry@zend.com> wrote:

> hi,
>
> could you please write down few use cases, when strict scalar type hints
> are really useful.
>
> Thanks. Dmitry.
>

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