> Because type hinting is supposed to limit what kind of variable type > is > allowed for a parameter. When you magically convert you kill the whole > idea of type hints and replace it with some magical function parameter > auto type conversion, which would be another hard to understand magic > feature of PHP.
This is one of the reasons I am not so sure I like the idea of type hinting for scalar types. In a language like php where you often times have data coming in as a string no matter what, it seems like strict type hinting would be a pain in the neck to use effectively. If you start using 'int' type checks for functions you are going to want to be passing data from _GET, _POST, etc to, you will have to do is_numeric checks or something similar, so instead of saving this userland code (like people are arguing scalar type hints will do) you are just moving that userland outside of the function into the code calling the function. That doesn't seem like much of a win to me in the ease-of-use regard. That being said I still do agree with Stefan that changing the type of a variable would be aweful. I do know that for any purpose I have for additional type hinting would actually be solved by just introducing type hints for 'scalar' (read string or int) and 'resource'. - Mike Lively -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
