Upcoming changes in PHP 7.1

Re:Upcoming changes in PHP 7.1 by djsumdog on Monday May 23, 2016 @12:55PM (#11755071)

I'll be honest that I was firmly in the /r/lolphp camp for years, but PHP7 shows real promise. There's a real AST parser and the core team seems to be doing a lot to shore up the language.

I still think adding a string to a number should error instead of giving a warning, but one thing at a time. PHP7 and the future roadmap makes it look like PHP is on a path to not turning into Perl.

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Re:Upcoming changes in PHP 7.1 by raiph on Monday May 23, 2016 @01:34PM (#11755391)

What do you think of the Perl 6 approach of providing both DWIM (weaker) and DWIS (stronger) typing?

* Numeric and string operators are kept distinct. For example `+` means numeric addition, never concatenation or some other string operation. To compare two strings, use `eq`, to compare two numbers use `==`. Etc. This sets things up nicely for supporting both DWIM and DWIS typing.

* DWIM typing: If you write something like `a + b`, you always get numeric addition. If need be the compiler tries to coerce `a` and `b` to numbers. `"12"` or `" 12" will both successfully coerce to 12. `"123foo"` and `"bar456"` will fail to coerce. If the coercion fails the program crashes at run-time.

* DWIS typing: To tighten type checking, add a type constraint. For example, `my Numeric (\a, \b) = ...` ensures that `a` and `b` only ever contain a numeric value.

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