Discussion on: I Want Scalar Objects in PHP

View post

well, i personally dont care, php as not strictly typed language curently is not ready for this. imho.
ps: in last snippet you have syntax error. :P :)

Ian Foulds • Aug 12 '18 • Edited

But we are slowly heading in that direction, far too slowly really. Strict types help you code better and stop of lot of issues that can take time to debug.

PHP 7 made some headway here with strict_types, if you don't want it don't set it to true, or just leave out your type hints altogether - very sloppy!

Personaly I'd love to have fixed types for variables:

int $myInt = 1;
string $myString = "1234";
bool $myBool = 45;  // Fails 
int $myInt2 = "5678";  // Fails

Or even better without the annoying $ prefix which does nothing IMHO:

int myInt = 1;
string myString = "1234";
bool myBool = 45;  // Fails
int myInt2 = "5678";  // Fails

Todd Blanchard • Sep 12 '18

Yes, all those Ruby and Smalltalk developers are producing completely unusable garbage because they lack manifest typing. /s

I like PHP's dynamic loose scripting nature. If you want that more verbose kind of thing, there is Java, or Swift, or whatever.

PHP's current nature fulfills a unique niche in my toolkit and I like it the way it is (although I'm all for consistent naming and moving to a more dynamic OO style).

John Alcher • Jul 18 '18

php as not strictly typed language curently is not ready for this.

Mind expanding your point here? What does type safety has to do with scalar objects?

Patrik Kristian • Jul 18 '18

I mean, when type is not enforced, scalar object can have different methods depending on current type. Or am I wrong?

John Alcher • Jul 18 '18

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't how JavaScript does it with .reduce, .map, .split etc... practically what the suggested improvement wants? And JS doesn't enforce types either, right?

Drew Knab • Jul 18 '18

Yep, and it would just require an extra step sometimes to explicitly cast to the desired type. We have to do this in PHP/JS sometimes now as it is.

Patrik Kristian • Jul 19 '18

It could be usable tho... i imagine this:

$array = ((string) $float)->explode(“.”);