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 <1755E8B5-229B-47B2-BBAF-B5E014F5473D@craigfrancis.co.uk> <1180af01-080f-ee0a-3159-74bf7e0a8aea@gmail.com>
 <73F563E2-7C31-4B5E-A6B9-AE1BD05ADD1C@craigfrancis.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <73F563E2-7C31-4B5E-A6B9-AE1BD05ADD1C@craigfrancis.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 26 May 2022 23:44:05 -0700
Message-ID: <CAMrTa2GyEyhsHU_qby6R4-kTbvY+ivzZPDOM0cGb2HzL0O9XVw@mail.gmail.com>
To: Craig Francis <craig@craigfrancis.co.uk>
Cc: Rowan Tommins <rowan.collins@gmail.com>, PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] NULL Coercion Consistency
From: jordan.ledoux@gmail.com (Jordan LeDoux)

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On Thu, May 26, 2022 at 5:21 AM Craig Francis <craig@craigfrancis.co.uk>
wrote:

>
> It sounds like you got lucky - you have a function that has a problem with
> NULL (but I assume it's fine with an empty string?), and during your
> testing you happened to pass NULL to this function. As noted before, static
> analysis is *considerably* better at these types of checks, because it's
> able check if variables *can* contain NULL. They can also perform other
> checks as well (important when your code seems to care about NULL vs an
> empty string).
>
>
Nearly *all* code has a problem with null. It very much feels like the
original effort to deprecate null calls decided to resolve this by saying
"let's have the language help developers improve their code so it doesn't
have these problems in the first place", and this effort is trying to
resolve this by saying "let's have the language support the buggy code in
ways that makes it work".

At my job, my task for the last three weeks has literally been upgrading
our internal codebase for 8.1, and the biggest set of logs I'm dealing with
is exactly what you're talking about here: null's passed to internal
functions. Every single case I've looked at so far has been traced to code
that was written incorrectly, where some code somewhere was not properly
guarding its values, and error cases were slipping through.

Jordan

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