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Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 18:37:24 -0400
Message-ID: <CAKuGYLT17d0pL9taO6M0xUPwu3dPU6nLRNGWFc89k0RtU6BM6Q@mail.gmail.com>
To: Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com>
Cc: Zeev Suraski <zeev@php.net>, PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Reclassifying engine warnings
From: matthewmatthew@gmail.com (Matthew Brown)

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This is where I think PHP may have broken us a little.

I just asked a few non-PHP developers here what they expect "(function () {
$a++; })()" to do, and they agreed it would be some sort of error. Got the
same answer for "(function () { $a->bar =3D 5; })() ".

Indeed, anyone who's used another C-like language (JS, TS, Java, C# etc) is
used to these things being errors, so it can be disorientating to see them
treated as anything else by PHP (it was disorientating for me, at least).

On Wed, 28 Aug 2019 at 18:06, Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi!
>
> > If we want PHP to be as easy as possible then $nullref->bar(),
> > $foo->someUndefined(), new UndefinedClass etc shouldn=E2=80=99t be exce=
ptions
> > either - they can just be notices.
>
> I don't see how it follows. Calling unknown method does not have natural
> default - if I tell you "would you please do abracadabra" you can't just
> do something random and consider it done - you should tell me "what do
> you mean by that? Please explain what you want me to do".
> However, if I tell you "here's an apple, add it to your pocket", then
> there's a natural way of knowing how many apples is in your pocket for
> every state of your pocket before - if your pocket was empty, it now has
> one apple, if it had apples before, now it has one more. I don't need to
> explain you what to do when your pocket is empty and when it's not
> separately - you can guess intuitively what should happen in each case
> and you'd be 100% right always.
>
> That's the natural difference between $foo++ and foo() - in the former
> case, you know what should happen in any case (including when $foo is
> initialized to a non-numeric value - *then* you error out), in the
> latter, if foo() is not defined, there's no natural way to go but to
> error out. There's a crucial difference here because variables are
> containers, not actors. Dealing with an empty container has natural
> semantics (in some cases at least), dealing with non-existing actor does
> not.
> --
> Stas Malyshev
> smalyshev@gmail.com
>

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