Expressing intent is important to achieve readable and clear code. Unfortunately, PHP’s array
is the very anti-thesis to this, as it can mean anything and nothing. One solution would be to split the array
type-hint into list
and dict
, where an error would be thrown if an array with string keys where used as a list.
This could be implemented fairly easy in the PHP source code, marking an array as a list at creation:
$arr = [];
but mark it as dict as soon as it is “abused”:
$arr['foo'] = 'bar';
or
$arr[345] = 'foo'; // In an array with only 3 elements
There are of course more edge cases, but the point is to have a single boolean check, not to traverse the keys of the array, to decide if it’s a list or a dict.
It’s unfortunate that list
is already used as a language construct to unpack an array. Otherwise, it could perhaps be used as an internal data structure together with dict, as in
$list = new List(); $list[] = 'first_element';
and
$dict = new Dict(); $dict['key'] = 'value';
(Yes, of course it’s possible to create these classes, but they would not have optimized data-structures in the PHP source-code, e.g. implementing the list as a dynamic array where read-access is constant and memory footprint small.)
Anyone knows an RFC or similar? Has this been proposed before?
Edit: Hacklang already did it: https://docs.hhvm.com/hack/built-in-types/arrays
Edit 2: And a PHP extension for PHP 7: https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.ds.php
Edit 3: And of course SPL: https://www.php.net/manual/en/spl.datastructures.php
Edit 4: This can be made backwards compatible. Maybe a better title would have been: “Add type-hints for list
and dict
“.
submitted by /u/usernameqwerty003
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