Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:83518
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: error (pb1.pair.com: domain lsces.co.uk from 217.147.176.214 cause and error)
Message-ID: <54EA7BDC.7000002@lsces.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2015 01:01:16 +0000
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.4.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: 'PHP internals' <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Type hints ...
From: lester@lsces.co.uk (Lester Caine)

Silly question time again ...

Currently I have an array of variables and the docblock annotation tells
me just what each element is intended to be. I process the variables on
that basis and while it may be helpful to have some higher level of
'restraint', I have a working flexible system. As a variable is
processed it is constrained by the appropriate rules. If PHP adds 'Type
Hints' they will only apply to where I am passing an array variable, and
the type hint adds additional processing to that which I already
maintain myself. How will that improve performance?

Add to this equation that the type and constraints of a variable may
well vary from one record set to another. It may well be that a fixed
set of types can be defined, but these are not the types currently being
defined and would include date types in parallel with a group of numeric
types.

Passing 'strict' types in some cases just does not compute in my book,
and even 'coercive' types only addresses a subset of the types needed so
that it adds another layer of 'checking' over what we already have in
much of the existing user code base. People keep going on about
different rule sets but this just adds another set of 'rules' rather
than a single solution.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk
Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk