Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:108604
To: internals@lists.php.net
References: <16481aca-93f4-43f5-5ec2-413d19ade318@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2020 18:21:56 +0000
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/68.4.2
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <16481aca-93f4-43f5-5ec2-413d19ade318@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Language: en-GB
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: Allow null variables to be decremented
From: marandall@php.net (Mark Randall)
Message-ID: <php.internals-108604@news.php.net>

On 15/02/2020 17:44, Rowan Tommins wrote:
> There is currently an odd inconsistency when using the decrement 
> operator on a null variable:

I'm not so sure...

That incrementing a null works at all is a painful part of the language 
spec that I would argue needs flushing down the toilet, rather than 
further reinforcing.

I recon the required precursor to doing so is erroring on undefined 
variables, which I suspect accounts for about 99% of increment-on-nulls.

The majority are in favour (56%) but not the supermajority necessary - 
Athough there's an argument to be made that a supermajority may exist in 
a straight up or down vote rather than a 3-way 
(https://wiki.php.net/rfc/engine_warnings).

So on one hand, consistency is good.

On the other hand, being consistently bad is still being bad.

--
Mark Randall
marandall@php.net