On 2-Jul-09, at 3:28 AM, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
Hi!
2) Type hinting will not create a mess of cast to the right types
in the code as Stas had suggested, in close to a million lines of
PHP code we have, I've been able to find less then 1000 (just did a
grep) instances of casts. There is a good reason for that once you
get out of the input processing stage you typically (aside from
__toString()) have the data in the right type. The code also
includes bits from PEAR and external
The problem here is that if you want to write a robust code that
wouldn't randomly fail at runtime "typically" isn't good enough
If it fails it means some funciton did not return the expected value
and that's a problem, not something that should be ignored if you
decided (if you don't want to use, then things remain as they are) to
use type hinting.
- since wrong type is supposed to be a fatal error (which one could
not handle in the typehinted library code since it happens on the
client side before your code takes control), you would want to
ensure that would never happen when you call a typedhinted function.
And there's only two ways to do it - either make absolutely all
functions and variables that interact with typehinted functions to
be strict-typed (which we don't plan do) or do casts on each call to
hinted function. I do not see how anything else could produce robust
code provided that type mismatch is a fatal error and variables can
not carry type.
"stock php" for people to use. But please, don't reject this idea
because you personally don't see yourself using it or because you
want
Being a C programmer for... hmm... about 20 years now I think I
don't have too much problem with strictly typed languages :) I just
think doing it in PHP the way you want to do it is going to produce
a lot of issues that people tend to under-appreciate when they cheer
the new cool feature.
Also, looking at the patch I think it doesn't cover the matter of
inheriting the typehinted methods - i.e. if there's a typehinted
method, could I override it with non-typehinted version or vice
versa? What about typehinted interfaces?
Which is fine, because some people can use that functionality to
overload methods they don't want to be type hinted from external libs
the may be using.
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