Pascal Martin: In favor of RFC "Scalar Type Hints"

Pascal Martin has a new post today sharing some of his thoughts around one of the currently proposed PHP RFCs for < href="http://blog.pascal-martin.fr/post/in-favor-of-rfc-scalar-type-hints.html">scalar type hinting. PHP has had type hints for custom objects and some things like arrays but this proposal would add in additional ones for things like "string", "int" and "float".

The Scalar Type Hints RFC for PHP 7 has first been initialized in December 2014. It went on with version 0.2 at the middle of January 2015, after changing several major ideas, and is now in version 0.3, integrating return types, as RFC Return Type Declarations has been accepted a few days ago. [...] I've been following this RFC (and the previous ones) with some interest, and, as I've taken some time to play with it a bit last week, building PHP from the sources of the corresponding Git branch, I'll try summarizing here why I think it is interesting. Please note this is my personal opinion.

He starts with a look at what the proposal entails around these new scalar type hints and why he thinks they're a good idea. He looks at some of the things that PHP's current weak typing allows and how it has made the language very flexible as a result. He also shows how the proposal suggests the use of the "declare" function to define a strict typing constant to essentially turn on the checking only where needed. He provides a few code snippet example including object/method handling, setting a custom error handler and which of the calls work in which typing method. He finishes the post looking at the "per-file" idea of enabling the strict typing checks and some of his confusion around the point. He also talks about return types, the directives that are proposed to enable the feature and the current status of the RFC.

Link: http://blog.pascal-martin.fr/post/in-favor-of-rfc-scalar-type-hints.html