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Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2017 19:30:44 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Consistent null behaviour
From: lists@rhsoft.net ("lists@rhsoft.net")



Am 20.09.2017 um 19:23 schrieb ilija.tovilo@me.com:
> I realized after sending the initial E-Mail that there might be more 
> breaking changes than I thought, like the one you suggested.
> 
> The same thing actually happens for bools, ints and floats:
> https://3v4l.org/jvVbO
> 
> I wouldn’t depend on this behaviour since you’d get errors depending on 
> what is returned, like an empty array, a string, an object or resource.

i would depend on that behavior because in reality you can get back two 
different things:

* a numeric array with exactly index 0
* NULL

how do you imagine mysqli_fetch_row() return empty array, string or even 
object/resource? when nothing is found it's a non-empty array and 
otherwise NULL

before PHP 5.6 (or PHP 5.5 not sure) these where useless multiple lines 
because you needed to store the result of mysqli_fetch_row() in some var 
to access key 0

> On 20 Sep 2017, 19:18 +0200, lists@rhsoft.net <lists@rhsoft.net>, wrote:
>>
>>
>> Am 20.09.2017 um 19:06 schrieb ilija.tovilo@me.com:
>>> Hi everybody!
>>>
>>> To my surprise, I noticed today that an array access on a `null` 
>>> value returns `null` without any warning whatsoever.
>>> Accessing the property of a `null` value gives you a notice, while 
>>> calling a function on that `null` value gives you a fatal error.
>>>
>>> https://3v4l.org/ZSZHN
>>>
>>> This is pretty inconsistent. IMO all of these should be fatal errors, 
>>> although I realize that might be a bit drastic for PHP 8.
>>> We should at least give the user a notice when using array access on 
>>> a `null` value.
>>>
>>> Any thoughts?
>> wouldn't that break code like below which is IMHO the best usecase of
>> the PHP 5.6 feature that you can directly access a array field of a
>> function result and the type-casting encsues that the return-type is
>> always int
>>
>> function GetSKatMaxSort(int $archive=0): int
>> {
>> return (int)mysqli_fetch_row($this->db->query("select SQL_NO_CACHE
>> max(ssort) from {$this->db->table} where sarchive=$archive", 1))[0];
>> }