Can someone give me a definition of "type hinting" for Laravel 5 framework

Question

I've read the Laravel documentation and it's still not clear. Since it's vague to me, whenever the term arises in relation to another concept, it's hard to grasp that new concept as well.

Answer 1

Type-hinting isn't exclusive to Laravel... Here is a simple explanation.

Example without type hinting:

function foo ($arr = array(), $str = '') {
    var_dump($arr);
    var_dump($str);
}

This function expects an array as the first parameter, and a string as the second. But there is nothing enforcing it. I could call foo() with two strings and there would be no issues.

Example with type hinting:

function foo (array $arr = array(), $str = '') {
    var_dump($arr);
    var_dump($str);
}

The only difference here is the type hint array before $arr. Now trying to call the function with two strings will return a fatal error, because the first argument must be an array.

For further explanation and to find out which type hints are supported, see the documentation.