Posted by Tony Marston on 05/25/05 08:34

"Oli Filth" <catch@olifilth.co.uk> wrote in message
news:1116892689.632400.237520@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> dterrors@hotmail.com wrote:
>> Will php 6 do strong typing and/or namespaces?
>>
>> I was shocked to find out today that there are some people who
> actually
>> argue that weak typing is somehow better.

What's so shocking about it? I much prefer a language where I can use
variables without having to declare them first. I also love the ability to
test for and change a variables's type. Very convenient.

> I completely agree. Strong typing makes far more sense due to the
> compile-time constraints it enforces. Anyone who thinks otherwise is
> lazy, quite frankly, and isn't thinking in terms of long-term
> maintainability and debugging.

Absolute rubbish!

> It also buggers up the fundamental point of OOP, i.e. polymorphism.

Absoute Rubbish!

>> Anyway if anyone knows that php is going to intentionally stay weak
> in
>> the future let me know so I can jump ship, thanks,
>
> Scripting langauges are not compiled, in general. Therefore most don't
> seem to use strong typing, because there's no compiler to catch this
> sort of thing. e.g. PHP, Perl, VB, VBscript, Javascript. I don't think
> this is likely to change in the future. As Andy says, this would be a
> fundamental paradigm shift in any language.
>
> Also, I think languages like PHP are designed for people who don't know
> much about "proper" programming.

Yet it can still be used by people who know a great deal about 'proper'
programming. I used various 2nd, 3rd and4th generation languages for 25+
years before I switched to PHP.

> It's designed for people who just want
> to throw something together that does the job. No need to worry about
> algorithm optimisation, memory allocation or deallocation, hash-table
> searching, string handling, type-casting, or indeed typing in general.

So what?

Tony Marston
http://www.tonymarston.net

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