Hi!
There will also be advantages for HipHop which can afford to spend the time to do static analysis of code -- I know that HipHop is not your baby but you now need to recognise that there is more than one PHP implementation and features that may not had much advantage with Zend may be useful elsewhere.
If you want a statically typed language, there are tons of these on the market. However, unless you change PHP into another - statically typed - language, I do not see how it really helps. What you talking about here is creating a dialect of PHP targeted for statically-compiled environment. I personally see it a bit pointless, since there are already many perfectly good static languages on the market, with excellent compilers and environments - so why not use any of these? But that shouldn't deter you - my personal opinion is just that, if you want to create your own static PHP, go ahead. But I do not believe doing it in little tweaks would work - if you want reliable typing, you need it everywhere.
However, I seriously doubt PHP as a whole would benefit from it. Most uses of PHP are very dynamic and would not yield serious benefits from introducing static typing constructs beyond very specific cases in very specific environments. Changing the whole language to benefit these narrow scenarios does not seem beneficial to me.
-- Stanislav Malyshev, Software Architect SugarCRM: http://www.sugarcrm.com/ (408)454-6900 ext. 227 -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
