Hi! > And, heck, we use void in the PHP manual all the time.
Yes, because PHP manual *is* the documentation :) Note that function descriptions in the manual, while they are similar to PHP syntax, aren't actually valid PHP, even after scalar typing introduction. Bizarrely enough, they don't even match the return type syntax. > It most likely is, but it's not the only case that matters. What if you > mistakenly return a value in a function that's not supposed to? This > would catch you out. Why would I care about such a mistake? Why would I care so much that I would need a special language-level construct to catch it? How many such mistakes happen and are they critical enough to have the engine bothering with going after them? I think such mistakes are extremely rare and insignificant. > I feel that the basic facts about a function should be in the signature, > and shouldn't have to be hidden in a comment, if only because it's more I guess we disagree here, because I do not think comments are "hidden", and I do not think signature of the function should be the comment. In fact, in Java for example (which seems to be the model language for the strict typing aficionados) it is long standing best practice to actually verify the javadoc comments as part of the build and fail the build if they are missing or wrong. I am not advocating for doing (or not doing :) this in PHP, but I do say documentation is not "hidden" and strict typing is not the same as documentation. Moreover, in this case strict typing implies something that is outright false - the function that is declared void does return a value, namely null. Even worse, if you do try to return exactly the same value, the RFC requires failure in this case, which makes zero sense as precisely the same thing happens in both cases. > concicse and keeps information about parameters on the same line as the > parameters themselves. Unlike comments, type hints can't lie, because > they're actually enforced. In fact, it is the opposite - as I said above, that particular type does lie, and it has to, because what it tries to express actually does not exist in PHP. I might be reluctantly ok with tolerating purely documentation type, but tolerating purely documentation type that is in fact untrue does not look good to me. -- Stas Malyshev smalys...@gmail.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
