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Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 10:18:12 -0700
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Subject: Re: foreach with null
From: buddhahead@gmail.com (Sebastian)

> Any opinions?

Good code is code that's easy to debug (among other things). By
removing the "Invalid argument supplied for foreach()" warning without
providing mechanisms to turn it on, debugging code will be more
difficult. Logically speaking, when does it make sense to iterate over
something that isn't an array?

If I were writing one-time use scripts that I will never use again
(not likely) this might be desired behavior. If I were writing code
that is used by other programmers, paying users, and under conditions
likely to change (implying changing code, and often debugging and
testing), the ability to detect errors as early as possible is vital
(The Pragmatic Programmer is a good reference for this). Most people
don't want to spend more time than is necessary to troubleshoot code.
Probably more importantly, managers and customers don't want to wait
longer for a product they're paying for.

Understandly, PHP aims to be "easy" in so many ways, but I believe in
order for PHP to survive in the enterprise and allow users to easily
write good code, it *must* support such features. Without features
like these, writing PHP won't be so easy because the work required to
do the checking is forced on the programmer.

The "Invalid argument supplied for foreach()" warning should not be
removed unless it can be done without breaking compatibility and with
a way to optionally turn it on/off. I think we can learn a good lesson
from Perl on this one. Here is how we turn on/off warnings, lexically:

use warnings;

- sebastian