On 29/12/2021 16:58, Lynn wrote:
While I'd love for this inconsistency to go away, I also know that this is most likely such a big change that it causes months of work and broken code because it relies on this behavior. It wouldn't surprise me if this singular change would cause more work than all previous BC breaks combined.
I was about to say the same thing - this is one of those ingrained behaviours that is very hard to analyse use of without running the code, so only someone with an extraordinarily good test suite would detect that their code was affected before it went live.
Like a lot of PHP's type juggling features, it is surprising in a pure data crunching context, but extremely reasonable in PHP's original and still very popular context of processing input from web forms. For instance, a list of products fetched from a database will likely have indexes which are integers, but a value from $_GET or $_POST will always be a string. It's therefore quite helpful that $products[42] and $products['42'] refer to the same thing, so that you can write $products[$_GET['id']] rather than $products[(int)$_GET['id']].
Would this feature be included in a language designed with knowledge of how PHP is used today? Possibly not, but we have no time machine to change our minds now.
One vaguely plausible (but not easy to implement) way forward is to have new array-like types, where keys and values can be constrained in different ways. Then it could obey the local scalar type passing setting ("strict_types") to allow combinations like this:
declare(strict_types=0); $stringKeyedArray = new dict<string,mixed>; $stringKeyedArray['42'] = true; // key kept as '42' $stringKeyedArray[42] = true; // actually sets key '42' $intKeyedArray = new dict<int,mixed>; $intKeyedArray[42] = true; // key kept as 42 $intKeyedArray['42'] = true; // actually sets key 42 declare(strict_types=1); $stringKeyedArray = new dict<string,mixed>; $stringKeyedArray['42'] = true; // key kept as '42' $stringKeyedArray[42] = true; // TypeError $intKeyedArray = new dict<int,mixed>; $intKeyedArray[42] = true; // key kept as 42 $intKeyedArray['42'] = true; // TypeError Regards, -- Rowan Tommins [IMSoP] -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: https://www.php.net/unsub.php
