Hello Ray,
Thursday, June 17, 2004, 3:23:10 PM, you wrote:
> I understand your point, however, this is the way that other languages
> behave and its a feature that i consider to be very necessary and
> timesaving.
In this case PHP behaves like Java very only one pass by reference
is allowed.
You compare this to C++ and others where pointers exist. And obviously
you can set a pointer to NULL.
BUT we are talking of pass by reference or pass by value since a PHP
pointer is a '$$name' construct.
> My understanding was that Typehinting exists to save having
> to do such if-else clauses all the time, since 99.9% of the time, you
> will expect an object of a certain class or nothing at all.
Exactly. And i don't want to have to write
function bla(Classname $x) { if (!is_null($x))....
all the time.
> The problem
> here is that i need only to know that an argument is either an instance
> of a class or null, nothing else, but removing the typehinting
> effectively means any argument can be passed, and its not longer
> enforced at a PHP level, but within my own code... and since this is
> something that happens a lot, it seems a shame to loose this handy,
> timesaving functionality.
I don't think it is timesaving to have to write '!is_null()' all the time.
And once again null is not an instance of any class.
Last but not least we know already that a lot of people like to
be able to handle both instanceof or null with typehints. But at
the moment we have no solution that can go into PHP 5.0. However
i am quite sure we will address this for 5.1.
> Ray
> and Marcus Boerger wrote:
>>Hello Ray,
>>
>>Wednesday, June 16, 2004, 4:26:26 PM, you wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Hi all,
>>>
>>>
>>
>>[....]
>>
>> - NOTHING stops you from passing NULL to functions.
>> - Typhints are a shortcut for an 'instanceof'`test
>>
>> - now try NULL instanceof stdclass:
>>
>>php-cvs $ php -r 'var_dump(NULL instanceof stdclass);'
>>bool(false)
>>
>>- what you probablywant is
>>function bla($x) {
>> if (is_null($x)) {
>> // handle null
>> } else if ($x instanceof whatever) {
>> // handle instance
>> } else {
>> // handle error
>> }
>>}
>>
>>- if you look again you'll see that you are doing *three different*
>> things in your code. Typehints have a different usage!
>>
>>best regards
>>marcus
>>
>>
>>
--
Best regards,
Marcus mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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