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Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 10:44:34 +0100
Message-ID: <cd5680a20912310144p29ed905u63eea7827e97996a@mail.gmail.com>
To: Stanislav Malyshev <stas@zend.com>
Cc: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] invalid params return value
From: indeyets@gmail.com (Alexey Zakhlestin)

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 7:10 AM, Stanislav Malyshev <stas@zend.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> One of the many things that is chaotic in PHP is what internal function
> returns when invalid parameters are given (i.e. params parsing fails). Most
> of those functions do one of:
>
> 1a. just return - this happens with most standard ext code, which was
> converted from old params parsing to a new one.
> 1b. RETURN_NULL() - this is effectively the same as 1a, but the code is
> different.
>
> 2. RETURN_FALSE - some random set of functions does that, e.g. some of PDO
> functions (PDO::prepare, PDO::setAttribute, etc.). NB: I'm not singling out
> PDO here, it happens all over the code, it's just first thing that came to
> my mind.
>
> So, both of the values are kind of OK and both have the same flaw - function
> could legitimately return both NULL and false. I don't have good argument
> for either of these as opposed to another one. However, I think we should
> have ONE standard return value in this case - even better, some macro like
> RETURN_ARGS_FAIL() (if you have a better name, ok).
>
> So, what do you think of that?

standard macro is a good idea. I also think, that NULL makes more
sense in this case.
NULL kinda means "nothing was returned", which should be the case
exactly (as function didn't start to work, actually)


-- 
Alexey Zakhlestin
http://www.milkfarmsoft.com/
Sent from Prague, Czech Republic