At 15:05 25/05/2010, you wrote:
I don't know if I have a full understanding about zval.type on internal
C-level. But in my code I always use strict type checking in comparisons and
in functions like in_array that offer that possibility. That's because I
learned the hard way how much debugging time it saves if I handle my variable
types with care. (Things like '11111111111111111' == '11111111111111112'
evaluating to true on 32 bit don't make it better.)I'd say: the type-juggling is not the big plus of PHP. BTW: if I read
some "PHP is so enterprise-ready" articles, I never read about the advantages
of weak types. (I'd even liked it, if there would be an optional(!)
possibility of variable type declaration. Who cares, could use it - others
ignore it.)
Thomas,
I think that these statements put you in a small minority amongst
PHP's millions of users. PHP's type system is one of its key
benefits, and while there's debate over what kind of type hinting we
should implement - I don't think there's any meaningful debate
regarding PHP's weakly typed nature at large.
I think there's also a fairly wide consensus that the 'those who care
can use it and those who don't can ignore it' approach doesn't hold
water. Adding clutter to the language brings about inherent
complexity - for both those who use it and those who don't (use it or
not - you're going to start seeing it in frameworks, books,
tutorials, applications and code snippets - you can't avoid it).
In contrast to "normal" PHP behavior where the user doesn't care about
variable types, with type hinting in methods/functions it is explicit what's
required. Every non-strict type handling is contra-productive. So if someone
wants to use my function with hints, he needs to care about his types.
Other than the thinking the user 'should care about types' I've yet
to see any real reason of why type conversion - the same thing that's
done across the whole of PHP - would be bad. As mentioned in our RFC
- there are several fundamental reasons of why the opposite is true.
When you take into account we're primarily talking about option #3
now (i.e., meaningless conversions such as "abc" -> int or
array->scalar will be rejected) - there's really hardly any reason at
all to go for strict typing.
My opinion:
Mine:
- When a caller sees that a function expects an 'int', he should be
thinking about the semantics of the value he passes on, and not about
its zval.type value. - Adding two separate systems of type hinting is even worse than
adding strict typing alone. You get all the issues of strict typing,
plus the clutter of two disparate systems. - The only thing that's even worse is having that controlled through
an .ini setting. That's not even negotiable - we decided to avoid
.ini entries that effect the language behavior many years ago. - If you take strict typing away, you lose almost nothing but the
warm fuzzy feeling of strong typing. Auto-converting type hinting is
more than sufficient to handle PHP's scalar function arguments.
(no offense taken in your post - we're simply clearly very far apart
in the way we perceive PHP...)
Zeev