Ron Korving wrote:

While I like the idea of type hinting on scalars, I agree that it causes issues. Using request data is the main issue. Its all strings.

The only way I see it working is if the hints converted the data and checked if it "changed". So, "1" and 1 are "the same" so it does not complain. Likewise, any number could be changed to a string. But non-numeric strings changing to 0 would throw an error. That is the main place where scalars cause issues.

That does bring up the question of why scalar as a hint is not supported.

function test (scalar $var) { echo $var; }

I would seem that would have made sense. Currently, that code throws:

Fatal error: Argument 1 passed to test() must be an object of class scalar

That is funny on its own.