Why is php weakly typed

It is the best way of experimenting and sharpening the programming skills. It does not only enhance knowledge of a person with programming aspects but also gives them the confidence to deal with complex problems.

The story written above is describing why PHP is a popular loosely-typed language, various advantages and drawbacks are also discussed but not to scare you but to give you a complete overview so that you can pick up the right language as a professional.

Contact us. Optimum Flexibility Dynamic applications are quite tough to work with. Scope of Experimentation It is the best way of experimenting and sharpening the programming skills. Drawbacks While programming in PHP, the programmers must be aware of the data typing.

Without this, they may be creating vulnerable codes that may lead to vulnerable applications and websites. PHP can create major errors.

Say, for instance, your code needs integer input, and your variable is in a string. As the most undesired output, the entire function will break. However, it is possible to overcome this issue by creating a properly-structured and organized programming code.

Type hints only ensure a variable's type at that point in time, without a guarantee about any future value that variable might have. Am I saying that strong types are better than weak ones? But there's an interesting property to strong types, they come with a few guarantees. If a variable has a type that's unchangeable, a whole range of unexpected behaviour simply cannot happen anymore.

You see, it's mathematically provable that if a strongly typed program compiles, it's impossible for that program to have a range of bugs which can exist in weakly typed languages. In other words, strong types give the programmer a stronger insurance that the code actually behaves how it's supposed to. This doesn't mean that a strongly typed language cannot have bugs! You're perfectly able to write a buggy implementation. But when a strongly typed program compiles successfully, you're sure a certain set of bugs and errors can't occur in that program.

If you want to further explore the topic on strong and weak types, I'd recommend starting with this video by Gary Bernhardt. Not only does it go further into detail on types, Gary also discusses an important mindset in the whole types debate. We talked about strong and weak types, what about static and dynamic types? As you're probably aware, PHP is an interpreted language. This means a PHP script is compiled at runtime. When you send a request to a server running PHP, it will take those plain.

This is one of PHP's strong points by the way: the simplicity on how you can write a script, refresh your webpage and everything is there. That's a big difference compared to a language that has to be compiled before it can be run.

There is a downside though: performance. And it's not hard to pinpoint this down: the more tasks there are to do at runtime, the more impact there is on performance. One of those many tasks the PHP engine has to take care of? Type checking. Because PHP checks the type of variables at runtime, it is often described as a dynamically typed language.

A statically typed language on the other hand, will have all its type checks done before the code is executed. I hope that after the theory, it's clear to you that PHP is a dynamic, weakly typed language.

Some things you may want to know before reading any further:. PHP has been moving toward a strongly-typed ethos for some time. As of PHP 7. However, the main item that is missing, is types within methods.

That may come in a future version, however the underlying issue of type coercion is or at least, is for now not being addressed. By switching to objects , or more specifically object wrappers around the native PHP data types string , int , float and bool , PHP will prevent you from engaging in this sort of behaviour. When you need to convert to another type, you can instead defer to a custom conversion method that has the appropriate logic to handle valid conversions, and to throw an exception when the conversion is not possible e.

In my opinion, this is a step in the right direction. In this respect, tasks will take slightly longer to complete. For most applications, the impact is often negligible milliseconds or even nanoseconds. However, for applications where performance is extremely important, using this approach may not be preferable.

As usual, all you need to do, is pull in the package using Composer:. You can then begin using the class wrappers by importing them:. At this point, you can use them as you would any other object e. As a result, a suffix had to be added to enable compilation. To create an instance, use the new keyword, or the make factory method:.

Both of the above approaches throw an exception if the supplied parameter is not of the correct type e. You may also pass an instance of the same object type. This is useful when using utility methods e. As you would expect, if you supply an incompatible strong type, PHP will throw the same exception as the example shown above:. If you wish to convert a different data type e.

For example, consider that in PHP, converting 0 to a bool results in false , while converting a negative number e. If you wish to convert a nullable type to a non-nullable type, or vice-versa, call the corresponding casting methods:. All created types are immutable , allowing you to easily create new instances while not modifying the originals e.