On 13 October 2015 at 23:49, Andrea Faulds <a...@ajf.me> wrote: > Hi Adam, > > Adam Harvey wrote: > >> (Sorry Andrea, I'm picking on your e-mail because it's easiest, but >> it's a general response to the thread.) >> > > Ah, don't worry about it. > > I agree that we should do something, but I think we should alias. >> >> We allow both "int" and "integer" in settype() and we allow it in type >> casting — the two other places where a user can specify a type for >> conversion. >> > > We also support 'real' and 'binary' in casts, but these are quite rare, > and I think (int) is a lot more common than (integer), heck, the manual > uses it. > > I still think it's a poor choice to not allow both in type >> declarations: while I'm generally a fan of having one way to do >> things, I believe that the inconsistency in the language is worse than >> the potential ambiguity in style guides. >> > > Well, we could support the full set of names (int, integer, long, float, > double, real, string, binary, bool, boolean) everywhere, but this is a bit > unruly. It's better to pick one and stick to it, and discourage the us of > the others or slowly phase them out.
I'm going to keep beating this drum, but I disagree with that last statement. We *should* at the very least support both full and short names for "int" and "bool": again, why stomp on people's muscle memory over something so utterly trivial to support? The only argument that I've gleaned from this thread is "but, but, it's *inconsistent*" and that is not something I disagree with at all. I simply prefer to support them, clearly most others here don't. An arbitrary code search shows that, for people currently documenting their arguments with phpdoc, a non-trivial number of people choose the longer terms for bool/int. [1] [2] > Hell, _I_ still can't remember which out of "int" and "integer" is the >> right one, and I've now written a decent amount of PHP 7 code _and_ >> wrote half of the documentation for this. >> > This. So much this. Just like you, I keep typing "integer", and "boolean". Maybe us folks on the documentation team have some mental deficiency that the more internals folks don't have? (I'm only half-joking there.) > > The rule seems to be 'integer' in English, 'int' in code, for the most > part. I'd agree with "for the most part" but I disagree with that part being a large enough part to ignore the other parts. > > Plus, if we error when "integer" is used, we've moved people's cheese >> anyway (by disallowing the class name). Let's not compound that by >> forcing them to do busywork. >> > > I think this would drill into you that it's 'int' not 'integer' pretty > quickly, so it wouldn't become annoying. It's int. It's int. It's int. It's int. For this to be resolved, at least for me, personally, there's going to need to be a lot more drilling. I like to think that I'm not alone in this respect, but maybe that's not the case. > > >> Adam, who hopes that anecdote doesn't say more about his working >> memory than the design of the language. >> >> Peter, who is a little tired of the folks beating the "more errors please" drum. > > PHP is a confusing behemoth, don't worry, you're not alone :) > > Thanks. > > -- > Andrea Faulds > http://ajf.me/ > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > [1] "@param boolean" https://github.com/search?l=php&q=%22%40param+boolean%22&ref=searchresults&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93 [2] "@param integer" https://github.com/search?l=php&q=%22%40param+integer%22&ref=searchresults&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93
