Welcome

Welcome to the documentation of the THP programming languague.

THP is a new programming language that compiles to PHP.

This page discusses some of the design decitions of the language, if you want to install THP go to the installation guide](/installation-guide)

If you want to learn the language, go to the learn section.

Goals

Bring static typing to PHP: Not just type hints, not use mixed for everything that isn't a primitive type.
Avoid automatic type conversion.
Remove the inconsistencies in the language.
Organize the stdlib.
Differentiate between Arrays, Tuples, Maps and Sets.
Create a consistent language.
Create typings for popular libraries (like TS's .d.ts).
Have a simple instalation and configuration (requiring just Composer).
Ship a fast, native binary (not written in PHP).
Sub 10ms watch mode.
Support in-place compilation.
Emit readable PHP code.
Implement a LSP server.

Not goals

These are not aspects that THP looks to solve or implement.

Be what TypeScript is for JavaScript (PHP with types).
Use PHP syntax/conventions.
Be familiar for PHP developers.

Philosophy

Consistency over familiarity
Change over conventions
Explicit over implicit

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Compared to PHP

Differences

Runtime similarities

Improvements

use PDO
use Globals::Env

val (Some(dbUri) Some(dbUser) Some(dbPassword)) = (
    Env::get("DB_URI")
    Env::get("DB_USERNAME")
    Env::get("DB_PASSWORD")
)
else {
    die("All 3 db environment variables must be set.")
}

match PDO(dbUri dbUser dbPassword) {
    Ok(connection) -> { /* db operations */ }
    Err(pdoException) -> { /* handle exception */ }
}

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