Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:117734
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
 boundary="------------kMN20015veFgnRb5AD6VxuDo"
Message-ID: <c5df6518-3e9b-dcd5-a18b-f60e08ef7004@gmx.net>
Date: Mon, 16 May 2022 17:43:16 +0200
MIME-Version: 1.0
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/91.8.0
Content-Language: en-US
To: internals@lists.php.net
References: <eb2bef11-4027-8555-93e3-89c2cc4f5a18@gmx.net>
 <CAGBsUrdLdJGMg-0BH311fKJ+41EWL2eNQaLMMpY2XevNFSvW4Q@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAGBsUrdLdJGMg-0BH311fKJ+41EWL2eNQaLMMpY2XevNFSvW4Q@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [Discussion] Stricter implicit boolean coercions
From: a.leathley@gmx.net (Andreas Leathley)

--------------kMN20015veFgnRb5AD6VxuDo
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Hello Kamil,

I suspect this is very different depending on the codebase. My main
reason for introducing this deprecation notice is to start highlighting
possible problems in codebases where nobody even suspected them before.
In one application recently I actually had the string "false" (coming
from a form transmission) being passed to a boolean argument and leading
to true, which definitely was unintended.

I have tried coming up with reasons why these deprecation notices could
be harmful or unnecessary, but I think anytime they occur there is a
legitimate reason to check the code (and make it more explicit). If an
integer 5 is passed to a boolean type, how is that not suspicious? Yet I
do think this is a deprecation notice that will be far less common than
some in recent history (like "non-integer-compatible float to int
conversions" or "passing null to non-nullable parameters of built-in
functions"), because there are far less boolean parameters in the
built-in functions of PHP compared to string/int, and I'd wager bool is
also less used in codebases compared to string/int/float.

If you or anybody else has a recommendation on how to measure how this
would affect codebases and what information in that regard would be
useful, I am open to look into that more. The impact should be rather
low in general because it is only a deprecation notice, and I think a
lot of codebases are getting used to dealing with deprecations more with
the last two PHP versions.

Best regards,

Andreas

On 16.05.22 17:19, Kamil Tekiela wrote:
> Hi Andreas,
>
> Has any case study been done already about how it will affect existing
> codebases?
>
> Regards,
> Kamil
>

--------------kMN20015veFgnRb5AD6VxuDo--