On 27/07/2021 14:32, Brent Roose wrote:
From a userland developer point of view:
- PHP 7.0 types were a pain because of non-nullable types, the feature only
became really useful as of PHP 7.1
You're not the only person to say this, but I find it really hard to
believe.
If this was so urgent that the feature was "not really useful" without
it, why did it take twelve years from the addition of type declarations
in PHP 5.0 (for classes and interfaces) until the "?" notation in PHP
7.1? Possibly because a syntax to make them nullable *was* added in PHP
5.1 (SomeType $foo=null), which continued to work for all the types
available in PHP 7.0. Or possibly because there were enough places where
people wanted non-nullable parameters that the feature was useful even
if it couldn't be used everywhere.
I can understand wanting to reduce the number of disruptive changes you
make to the code base, but whatever version you pick, you can think of
something in the next version up that you could wait for instead. Off
the top of my head, you could set your minimum to...
* PHP 5.1, for the "array" type declaration
* PHP 5.4, for the "callable" type declaration
* PHP 7.0, for "int", "string", etc
* PHP 7.1, for the "?" nullable notation and "void"
* PHP 7.4, for typed properties
* PHP 8.0, for union types
* PHP 8.1, for pure intersection types
* PHP 8.2, for ... maybe mixed union-and-intersection, maybe type
aliases, who knows...
Maybe 7.1 was a sweet spot for you in terms of cost-benefit; maybe 8.1
won't be, but maybe it wouldn't be even with nullable intersections, and
8.2 will be.
Sidenote: weren't there any prior cases where an RFC was accepted only to have
found out an oversight which resulted in that RFC to be postponed to the next
release?
That's the opposite of what's being requested here - what's being
requested is that an extra feature be added at the last minute, without
any changes to the feature already agreed. To my knowledge nobody has so
far suggested that the current implementation of intersection types
should be removed until this is resolved, and I can't think of any
reason why that would make sense.
Regards,
--
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]
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