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To: "Wez Furlong" <wez@thebrainroom.com>,
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Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 13:45:57 -0400
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Message-ID: <200309231345.58072.ilia@prohost.org>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Fwd: Re: #25494 [Com]: array_merge allowing "false" as argument (silent when non-array is passed)
From: ilia@prohost.org (Ilia Alshanetsky)

In my opinion the change is fine, given the current state of affairs a 
transitional release between 4.3 & 5.0 does not seem likely. Therefor it 
would only seem logical to give people a fair warning (E_NOTICE) that the 
(wrong) behavior they are relying upon is not going work/last forever. 
Otherwise, without a word of warning working code will suddenly become broken 
code once they upgrade.
Most people have their error reporting set to E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE (do not display 
notices) so it won't affect them anyway. Even then, the behavior itself 
implies a failure in some code, since an non-array value is passed to a 
function expecting an array. I venture it would help a number of people find 
errors in their code that before were nigh impossible to find and/or track 
down.

And yes PHP is typeless, but all of the code using new argument parsing 
functions will most definitely reject strings passed to functions expecting 
arrays and vice versa. I see this situations as not being any different.

Ilia