Comment by muyuu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by muyuu | Hacker News Reader

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Nope, there are conventions.

We have two distinct problems here:

- strings converting to numbers without there being any number on any side. "Peculiar" of PHP but easy to circumvent using string comparison. IMO belongs in PHP4 but not at all in PHP5, which is an attempt at a "general-purpose" language. To be frank, I thought PHP4 made more sense because it was 1st of class at what it did, while PHP5 falls short to a number of languages in basically everything.

- automatic integer-to-float comparison to accomodate bigger integers. A horrible hack to squeeze a little extra performance in naive benchmarks in computers with no native 64 bit integer support. This really makes no sense whatsoever now and may have had some partial justification in the early 90s, prior to PHP4 even.

Both ideas are terrible and pretty much unique to PHP of all popular languages.

This is not a philosophical debate about typing styles or the existence of perfect type conversions. PHP's problems in this regard are relics from a dubious past.

- automatic integer-to-float comparison to accommodate bigger integers. A horrible hack to squeeze a little extra performance in naive benchmarks in computers with no native 64 bit integer support. This really makes no sense whatsoever now and may have had some partial justification in the early 90s, prior to PHP4 even.

No, this is not unique to php. Many popular, comparable languages perform an int -> float conversion. For example, Perl:

$ perl -wle'print "20938410923849012834092834" + 0 if "20938410923849012834092834" == "20938410923849012834092835"'

2.0938410923849e+25

- This is not a philosophical debate about typing styles or the existence of perfect type conversions. PHP's problems in this regard are relics from a dubious past.

Conversion from string -> number, and loose numeric types which auto-convert to float are near universal in loosely typed languages, out of necessity -- if such a scheme doesn't work consistently it can't be used at all. This brings me back to my point. You said "IMO this conversion should fail if the number represented is not valid, or fall back to arbitrary precision math". My response is that you cannot provide such a rule on the basis of "is it valid" because there is no such thing as a "valid" type conversion -- ALL have precision loss. It is inherent in the datatype. When I said "you may be underestimating the difficulty in predicting whether a particular decimal number can be accurately represented as a floating point type" you should perhaps read that as "you cannot do this, it is not possible".

Instead you might suggest that no loose conversion, no loose typing be permitted in a language design -- and I would agree wholeheartedly. But your suggestion that this be handled on a case-by-case basis depending on the numeric value is fundamentally unworkable. Big integers are not the only area this type of problem presents.

Perl5 is old enough so this behaviour has a niche. Possibly even PHP4 is old enough for that. But PHP5 was born when both 64 bit ints and good, open arbitrary precision libraries were available and very fast.

This, now, where it's being used, is absurd. There is no two ways to that. And this doesn't happen elsewhere to this extent.

I will leave you the last word though. Cheerio.

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