On Tue, Jun 18, 2024 at 11:04 PM David Gebler <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 18 Jun 2024, 17:40 Robert Landers, <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Hello internals,
>>
>> Many, many people start their files fairly religiously:
>>
>> <?php declare(strict_types=1);
>>
>> and I say "religiously" because from talking to people in real life,
>> reddit, workplaces, etc, very few php programmers actually know what
>> this does but do it nonetheless.
>
>
> I think there's almost certainly a degree of truth, not just in PHP but programming in
> general, in the idea that there are many people who will blindly follow a convention for no better
> reason they once heard someone they considered more senior than themselves say the words "best
> practice"
>
> But I don't think the meaning of strict_types in PHP is unclear. It's right there in
> the manual https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.declarations.php#language.types.declarations.strict
>
> If anyone is daft enough to use a language feature without referencing what it means or what it
> does, let them clean up any problems which arise for them as a result.
The problem isn't so much this, but in that it has become a dogma to
"have working types" and trying to explain why they do or do not
need/want it in the current context becomes a hopeless argument
because you are attacking their world-view instead of having an
academic argument.
>
> If I were to support any change to how this feature works for PHP 9, I think it would be
> providing a mechanism to enable it for all files at once, maybe either via a .ini setting such as
> strict_types_default=1 or a new declare which applies to all files included or autoloaded from that
> point on, i.e. a declare that could be used as the first line of an entrypoint script to make all
> files in a project have strict typing mode enabled/disabled (unless a particular file overrides for
> its own scope with its own declare).
I've explicitly written code without strict types because, in that
context, I want coercion (mostly when dealing with env vars)
surrounded by files with strict types enabled. Multiple steps would
have to be taken to make this possible (i.e., requiring the setting on
every file, whether off or on), negating the entire feature of having
it set globally. There may be a path where this makes sense, but I
don't think we can get there from here.
>
> Changing the name to anything other than what it is now, with or without flipping the value,
> just seems like a major BC headache for no gain.
>
> -Dave
Robert Landers
Software Engineer
Utrecht NL