OOP features

PHP 7 introduced a few new OOP features that will enable developers to write clean and effective code. In this section, we will discuss these features.

Type hints

Prior to PHP 7, there was no need to declare the data type of the arguments passed to a function or class method. Also, there was no need to mention the return data type. Any data type can be passed to and returned from a function or method. This is one of the huge problems in PHP, in which it is not always clear which data types should be passed or received from a function or method. To fix this problem, PHP 7 introduced type hints. As of now, two type hints are introduced: scalar and return type hints. These are discussed in the following sections.

Type hints is a feature in both OOP and procedural PHP because it can be used for both procedural functions and object methods.

Scalar type hints

PHP 7 made it possible to use scalar type hints for integers, floats, strings, and Booleans for both functions and methods. Let...