With the revived interest in the neighbourhood of type hints in the
last few days I'm resending this email from a few weeks ago.
In a nutshell, use auto-conversion for scalar type hints, and modify
the conversion rules throughout PHP to handle 'senseless' conversions
that result in data loss differently - by emitting E_TYPE.
Zeev
Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2010 17:17:13 +0300
To: Daniel Convissor <dani...@analysisandsolutions.com>
From: Zeev Suraski <z...@zend.com>
CC: PHP Internals List <internals@lists.php.net>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Type hinting
At 02:59 09/06/2010, Daniel Convissor wrote:
Hi Lukas:
On Fri, Jun 04, 2010 at 08:28:12AM +0200, Lukas Kahwe Smith wrote:
>
> Same deal as E_NOTICE. Either you care about them or you dont.
Exactly. The type hinting situation is unique. It is something that
applications will frequently want to handle gracefully in order to
provide useful error messages. A new error level is needed, as is an API
/ function to obtain the failed parameter names, desired type and passed
type.
Daniel,
I think having E_TYPE (or whatever), a non-fatal notice that can be
either ignored or handled separately from everything else makes
sense. I think we may actually want to introduce it at the most
basic levels of PHP, so that whenever data loss occurs (except for
explicit casts) - an E_TYPE warning will be generated. That will
bring consistency between the new type hinting and the rest of PHP. Thoughts?
Dmitry prepared a patch that implements auto-converting type hinting
with silent data loss. If we combine it with an
infrastructure-level E_TYPE upon data loss - I think we have a
pretty good solution overall. The patch is available at
<http://wiki.php.net/rfc/typecheckingstrictandweak>http://wiki.php.net/rfc/typecheckingstrictandweak
Regarding having an API that allows you to access the original
unconverted value and/or its type - I don't think we should go in
that direction. Presently this information is not retained in any
way, and retaining it would be quite a headache and we'll also incur
a performance penalty. If you're going to be using APIs to
determine what happened to a passed argument and behave accordingly
- why not simply avoid using type hinting, and perform type/value
checks in the function body instead?
Zeev
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