Does PHP really need interfaces?

Seeing as PHP is a dynamic language (like Python and Smalltalk), I don't see
what use an Interface has other than to satisfy a contract.

Why were they even added to the language? Can anyone think of any reason
that that they would be required?

I guess these are more rhetorical questions, but I woke up this morning and
it bothered me so much that I felt like starting a discussion :-)

Daniel Klein

Daniel Klein wrote:OO.

They can be very handy, especially when you don't have multiple inheritance.

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..oO(Jerry Stuckle)
Can you elaborate on that (just a bit, I know it's OT)? I've learned
programming with Pascal and I've never found it to be too restrictive.

On the contrary, I really liked its rules, the additional compiler
checks and enforcements, which helped to avoid many bugs right from the
beginning, because they could often be found at compile time already.
Can you give a short example where you think that Pascal's strong typing
becomes more of an interference?

Micha

Michael Fesser wrote:
To keep it short: Pascal puts you in a straitjacket. Without getting
into details, data types must match *exactly*. No implicit conversions
and very limited explicit conversions. C is on the other end - you can
convert almost anything to almost anything, whether it is correct or not.

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..oO(Jerry Stuckle)
IIRC they just have to be compatible, so you can easily cast one int
type into another. But I haven't used Pascal for years ...
Yes, and we know the results. Many things that you can do in C are
simply not possible in Pascal - for good reasons. I liked that.

But OK, that's completely OT here.

Micha

Michael Fesser wrote:Ruddy nightmare. I had to (re write in C eventually) a Pascal program to
decode a stream of mixed bits, bytes and blocks of data.

I didn't succeed.

Thats why I rewrote it in C. Possibly it is posible to create the
equivalent of a uninin in Pascal, but I didn't have time to work out how,

See above.

Jerry Stuckle wrote:C is in the middle. You can convert anything to anything, but very
seldom IMPLICITLY.

PHP converts anything to anything invisibly and implicitly, which means
you have to KNOW the rules of its implicit conversions.

Daniel Klein <danielk@featherbrain.netwrote:
My uneducated guess is that they were added to allow PHP to play more
directly in the CORBA/COM world.
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