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Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2025 11:46:58 -0500
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV][RFC] Deprecate type juggling to and from bool type within the
 function type juggling context
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From: larry@garfieldtech.com ("Larry Garfield")

On Wed, Jun 4, 2025, at 11:16 AM, Theodore Brown wrote:
> On Wed, June 4, 2025 at 09:37 Aleksander Machniak wrote:
>
>> On 4.06.2025 16:03, G. P. Banyard wrote:
>>> I don't understand what you mean.
>>> The purpose is to deprecate the behaviour in 8.5 so that it can be removed in PHP 9.
>>> We try to not break behaviour with no prior warning.
>>> Could you clarify what you mean?
>> 
>> I meant to move the deprecation to PHP 9.0. I feel the impact of
>> deprecation itself in this case might be significant.
>
> You feel there might be a lot of code passing floats, ints, or strings to
> `bool` parameters? I'm doubtful this is the case, since static analysis tools
> and IDEs are in much more widespread use nowadays.
>
> In my experience passing non-boolean values to a `bool` parameter almost always
> indicates a bug, and it would be valuable to get a deprecation notice sooner
> rather than later so these mistakes can be fixed.
>
> Regards,  
> Theodore

The one place I can see it being used now legitimately is MySQL's TINYINT pseudo-bool columns.  If you're mapping your query results into an object (please always do this), then you probably want to cast that into to a bool, and currently weak mode would let you do that implicitly.

I can't think of a case where a string or float magically casting to a bool is reasonable.

--Larry Garfield