There’s currently a proposal that’s under vote to add Scalar Typing to PHP (it has since been withdrawn). It’s been a fairly controversial RFC, but at this point in time it’s currently passing with 67.8% of votes. If you want a simplified breakdown of the proposal, check out Pascal Martin’s excellent post about it. What I want to talk about is more of an opinion. Why I believe this is the correct approach to the problem.

I have now forked the original proposal and will be bringing it to a vote shortly.