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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