So I'm not involved in the current discussion, but I remember some stuff from the last discussion and in general.
To start, you can consider the problem of type checking of scalars in a language with implicit type coercions. You're supposed to be able to treat 0 and 0.0 the same. At the same time, if you have a type check that says "int", you kinda expect to get an int. So "with cast" does that.
I know a lot of people find that ugly, and that you want to strictly that you must receive an int, but that's just not how people use PHP, and it doesn't make sense in the context of the language. As an example, you want to be able to add type checks to all the functions in the standard library, many of whom treat null, "0", 0 and 0.0 to be the same.
For PHP specifically, there is the additional consideration that PHP is supposed to be a newbie friendly language. There was a perception in the PHP internals community that newbie developers could not wrap their head around the concept of "types". I've heard people say that a developer shouldn't be required to think about what types his variable might hold. Clearly this is lunacy for many reasons, but there it is.
I just read the RFC, and I think it's very good. The only minor quibbles I have would be using the "compiler" instead of the parser to produce the hint, and whether or not you should cast if losing precision. But these are minor issues that should probably be ignored, since this improves the status quo considerably.
To start, you can consider the problem of type checking of scalars in a language with implicit type coercions. You're supposed to be able to treat 0 and 0.0 the same. At the same time, if you have a type check that says "int", you kinda expect to get an int. So "with cast" does that.
I know a lot of people find that ugly, and that you want to strictly that you must receive an int, but that's just not how people use PHP, and it doesn't make sense in the context of the language. As an example, you want to be able to add type checks to all the functions in the standard library, many of whom treat null, "0", 0 and 0.0 to be the same.
For PHP specifically, there is the additional consideration that PHP is supposed to be a newbie friendly language. There was a perception in the PHP internals community that newbie developers could not wrap their head around the concept of "types". I've heard people say that a developer shouldn't be required to think about what types his variable might hold. Clearly this is lunacy for many reasons, but there it is.