Hi internals, I carefully read all 3 proposed RFCs related to scalar type hints. As an end user and enthusiast of the language, I want PHP to always improve. STH is *the* major inclusion for PHP 7 and no matter how many people say about phpng performance, STH is the one that will impact mostly everyone on a day by day basis.
Now I also understand the rush of getting this feature in PHP considering the voted and approved deadline for feature freeze of PHP 7. However, we're not in a mission critical, losing millions or facing a world collapse if it takes an extra day or two to figure it out what people want, specially such an important feature. That said, I consider the feature freeze date a soft deadline than a hard one, and again, keeping in mind we could be potentially delaying the freeze due to the importance of what we're deciding. Back to the subject. I am a a strict camper, but I understand the nature of PHP and its loose type. Considering the 3 RFCs, and also counting the number of WTFs each one adds, I hereby describe my choice. By considering PHP's nature, having a dual mode is a WTF. I can see myself asking multiple times a day "is this file strict or not?" to trace potential bugs or type juggling. I do want strict, but I don't think it's the right time for PHP to make this move. Userland would have strictness, but all internal functions are a weird WTF type juggling mode. I originally switched my vote many times in the v3 of the RFC, mainly because PHP developers are the ones that would suffer by these configurability on a daily basis. I ended up with a YES vote because when considering STH or nothing at all, I prefer to have some. Coercive STH already added a WTH by not being inline with ZPP. It also have a timely migration path to turn them in sync, which would bring more breakage, more refactoring and more headache. Basic STH is the only one inline with ZPP, and the mostly natural for every PHP developer. They understand how internal PHP functions work and they know what to do. It also does not have the duality mode as v5 RFC. Therefore, this is where I'd place my vote. However, I do think that ZPP needs to migrate as Coercive STH partially defined to a stricter conversion scenario. That is what Basic STH should follow, but at the same time pace, not creating a discrepancy now and a WTF to userland. Ideally, Basic STH should also reuse ZPP support, meaning that any updates to ZPP would also benefit the STH. That said, I'll place my vote as YES in Basic STH and vote NO for the other ones. Regards, -- Guilherme Blanco MSN: guilhermebla...@hotmail.com GTalk: guilhermeblanco Toronto - ON/Canada
