|  | Posted by tony on 12/21/05 11:19 
>> You are not improving the language, you are killing it.
 > On the contrary. PHP could be a *lot* more strict in my opinion. I like
 the type hinting in PHP 5, as it saves me a *huge* amount of work in
 parameter checking.
 
 Type hinting is good, but this is an *addition* to the laguage that has
 no effect on existing code.
 
 > If you following "design by contract", you either
 accept a parameter as valid and do something with it or reject it. Most
 
 legacy code I encounter just accepts anything and hopes it does not
 explode. Yuck. I even don't like the automatic string-number
 conversion.
 If I pass a string to a numeric function, there's something
 fundamentally wrong with my code.
 
 Automatic string-number conversion is there for a very good reason -
 all input received from the HTML form is delivered as a string
 regardless of whether it's supposed to be a date, a number or whatever.
 The *feature* means that the programmer does not have to waste time
 performing manual type conversions before being able to process each
 field.
 
 > I don't want that covered up by the
 language, I want to get a decent error message. *Off course* foreach
 should give an error when something other than an array is passed!
 
 If you give it a string or a number, yes. But insisting that a null
 value cannot automatically be treated as an empty array is going over
 the top.
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