Hi Tony 2017-10-31 11:35 GMT+01:00 Tony Marston <tonymars...@hotmail.com>: > This strikes me as being nothing more than a micro-optimisation that does > nothing but pander to the laziness of certain programmers. Instead of having > to write a few lines of code to validate something they want the language to > do it for them. It may come as a surprise to some people, but being a > programmer actually involves the writing of program code. It is not > sufficient to express an idea and have the language fill in all the details > as that forces the language to have to detect and deal with a myriad of > possibilities.
I do understand where you are coming from, but I don't necessarily agree on this topic. We can (hopefully) agree that programming language design is hard, because we need to determine how fine a line we should have between things thats an integral part of the language, its standard library or its extensions and how much power the programmer has in their arsenal to do crazy things. If we boil things down, then we didn't really need the scalar type hints, PHP had been working perfectly fine for 20 years without it and while it does not add anything but a couple of checks at compile/runtime, its essentially "laziness of certain programmers" it becomes useful to. Another example is constant visibility modifiers in PHP 7.1. I think one of the advocates for features that are within that category you mention can sometimes be productivity and rid of boilerplate code. For this case with 'Array Of', I think it makes perfect sense to add with PHP7's improved type system on that regard, but thats my personal opinion. > I would evaluate each proposed change to the language with a simple question > - does it provide the greatest good to the greatest number? Considering the > fact that this RFC will only benefit a miniscule minority of developers yet > make the language more complicated, slower to run, and more difficult to > maintain as more and more edge cases are identified as "bugs", it offers > negative benefits to the vast number of programmers who are happy with the > language as it currently exists. As such it fails that test and should be > rejected. Tho you said its a micro optimization, would argue that (see [1]), it far from makes the code complicated, internally it doesn't add any complexity and only adds a member to the arg_info, which is an unsigned char, it wouldn't do anything unless a type is specified anyway and the slower to run argument above is pretty void, sure it adds a few CPU instructions but its not something you will feel unless you are Facebook, in which case you already re-implemented the language on your own. I fail to see how it offers "negative benefits to the vast number of programmers who are happy with the language as it currently exists", I myself don't like PDO, so I just use mysqli instead, great. If its not something that affects the programmer and the programmers code continue to run, I fail to see how it negatively impacts the vast majority. If I asked you how you feel about the exif extension now supports streams as arguments instead of only file names, would you care much unless you are actively using the exif extension? Probably not. [1] https://gist.github.com/KalleZ/c7ba4f78314c989e27710e4fa14e2f3e -- regards, Kalle Sommer Nielsen ka...@php.net -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
