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In-Reply-To: <bb322cbd-c283-ea77-8889-619f3927854c@aegir.sexy>
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2019 17:22:33 +0300
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To: Aegir Leet <aegir@aegir.sexy>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Reclassifying engine warnings
From: zeev@php.net (Zeev Suraski)

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On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 4:02 PM Aegir Leet via internals <
internals@lists.php.net> wrote:

> I know what the manual says about notices. But I don't agree with
> interpreting "could happen in the normal course of running a script" as
> "it's perfectly fine if this part of your code triggers a notice
> consistently and every time it goes down this particular code path".
> Rather, I've always interpreted this as "under certain, rare, unforeseen
> circumstances, your code could generate a notice here, probably because of
> something that is outside of your control".
>
> That's how I've always treated them at least.
>

And that's entirely within your right to do so - but what the manual says
is accurate.  Calling me delusional in my interpretation of it is somewhat
awkward (to put it mildly), I have a pretty good idea of why we added the
different error levels - I wrote much of it myself.

The whole point of having notices as something that's separate from
warnings is that they have different semantics, and that semantics is
captured very accurately in the manual.  They are used to mark issues which
may be problems, but may also be perfectly fine (unlike warnings, which
generally speaking mean that something bad happened, but not bad enough to
halt execution).  Notices were meant to help you implement a more strict
style of coding, and they may help you catch certain types of bugs, but you
can have perfectly working, bug-free code that generates notices.

Regardless of the exact semantics, don't you think a program that generates
> a constant stream of notices is a bit strange? That sounds like something
> everyone would naturally want to avoid. You don't drive your car with the
> check engine light permanently on and say "this is fine", right?


Except you can purposely turn off this 'check engine' light, never to see
it again if you choose to.  And that it's really not at all similar to
'check engine', but a lot closer to 'check cleaning fluid', or even 'clean
windshield' (if cars had a dashboard light for that).  Even that is not a
good analogy - as folks often actually purposely write code that generates
notices (which would be purposely hidden, either by error_reporting setting
or using @) that is 100% bug-free and working as intended.  So no, there's
nothing strange about it if you buy into that approach.  If you don't (and
I know you don't) - that's absolutely fine - it's up to you.

Zeev

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