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Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2019 14:33:44 -0600
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To: Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com>
Cc: Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com>, PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Deprecate left-associative ternary operator
From: levim@php.net (Levi Morrison)

On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 1:22 PM Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> > Inspired by Bob's recent RFC for concat precedence, I'd like to propose a
> > deprecation and removal of the left-associative behavior of ternaries.
> > Instead, explicit parentheses should be used:
> >
> > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/ternary_associativity
>
> Please, let's not mess with language syntax and require people to
> rewrite their code just because suddenly after 20 years of existence in
> the language we feel maybe the precedence should be different. I
> literally can't think of a single case where it would improve anyone's
> life in any substantial way. If you wanted to use parentheses, you can
> do it now - you can even have it enforced by code analyzer if you wish
> so, in your private code base. But I can easily imagine dealing with
> tons of deprecation warnings (which usually break CI unit tests and
> wreak general havoc) or even worse, useless errors, in existing code,
> which would become broken for no reason but... honestly, I don't even
> know how to finish this phrase, I can't even think of a single reason I
> could explain to anybody why their code would no longer work in 8.0.
>
> I understand 8.0 is a good target for breaking things. But that doesn't
> mean we have to do it as much as possible.
>
> And this absolutely doesn't mean we need to get 7.4 to break things (and
> yes, deprecation warning is breaking things, in most cases).
> --
> Stas Malyshev
> smalyshev@gmail.com
>
> --
> PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List
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We do not consider new warnings, including deprecation notices, as
breaking changes. We know that due to error handlers it can have an
effect, but it's just part of the process.

I disagree with Stas on the value. The precedence is wrong, and I know
of a few codebases which had bugs due to this. In every case, the fix
was to avoid it altogether. I agree with statement from the RFC:

> As left-associative ternaries are almost certainly bugs, the impact of this change should be minimal.

Thanks, Nikita, on putting this together. It's definitely not a "fun" RFC.