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Organization: Parliament Hill Computers Ltd
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Improving PHP's type system
From: addw@phcomp.co.uk (Alain Williams)

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 10:00:41AM +0100, Tony Marston wrote:

> I agree with Zeev 100%. There are too many people out there who are
> trying to make the language more complicated than it need be just to
> prove how clever they are. The aim of any language should be to
> enable programmers to do complicated things in a simple way, and not
> to do simple things in a complicated way.

I disagree. My way of looking at it is that adding some features(eg the current
type specification/checking) adds to the simplicity because I can say what types
I want and don't need to write code to check the types of argument received by a
function (etc).

Why would I want to check: because I value robustness, ie not having my code
fall over because, somehow, a wrong type slips by unnoticed.

Does that make quick/simple programming not possible in PHP ?

No: I will put the most of the robustness work into libraries/classes that I
write and want to reuse - the simple programs that use them don't necessarily be
written to the same standard.

> I have been programming for over 30 years, so in no way can I be
> classed as a newbie. PHP is my favourite language because of its
> simplicity. I started with PHP 4, and although I have upgraded to
> PHP 5 I refuse to use any of the "clever" additions which have been
> made to PHP 5 simply because I can achieve what I need to achieve
> WITHOUT using any of those additions.
> 
> I will not be making use of any changes that are made to the
> language in order to handle typed variables for the simple reason
> that PHP was specifically designed to be an untyped language, and in
> the 13+ years that I have been programming with PHP I have found
> that to be more of an advantage than a hindrance.

Type juggling is useful, but somewhere you do need to check your input.

I doubt that we will agree, but we don't need to: we prob have different aims
and goals. There is no reason that PHP cannot satisfy both of us.

-- 
Alain Williams
Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256  http://www.phcomp.co.uk/
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd. Registration Information: http://www.phcomp.co.uk/contact.php
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