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Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2015 23:30:51 +0000
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Syntactical change to Scalar Type Hints RFC
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

On 08/02/2015 20:33, Zeev Suraski wrote:
> FWIW, while I think strict types - stricter than even strict languages -
> don't belong in PHP, this syntax is clearly a step up from declare(), which
> was definitely not intended for this purpose.

I'm kind of intrigued what purpose it *was* intended for. I've always 
found it a rather odd part of the language, but this seems as logical a 
use for it as any.

For years, it had exactly one "execution directive", which worked in 
concert with a runtime event handler (ticks=N + register_tick_function). 
In PHP 5.3, a completely unrelated directive was added, to specify the 
encoding of the file (something that more obviously has to be detected 
by the compiler).

Was there an original idea of what it would be used for that never came 
to fruition? Or is there something I'm missing that connects "ticks" and 
"encoding", but excludes "strict_types"?

Regards,

-- 
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]