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Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:44:08 +0200
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To: "alan@akbkhome.com" <alan@akbkhome.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP 5.3.8 Released!
From: tyra3l@gmail.com (Ferenc Kovacs)

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 3:57 AM, alan@akbkhome.com <alan@akbkhome.com> wrot=
e:
> It might have been better to have waited for the is_a() fix to get sorted
> out.. - It's a very annoying BC break (changes the documented behaviour),
> and now it means we need 4.3.9 in a few more days.
>
> Let me know if you need help testing / applying etc..
>

from what I understand, this won't be changed, as the current behavior
is correct, the old was a bug:

as Stas pointed out:
"Not a bug. $var is interpreted as a class name. To know if one class
extends another, the class in question (first one) should be loaded.
There's no need to load the second one since if it's unknown nothing
can be instance of it and existing classes can not extend it."
if you used this previously

from Dmitry:
"Before the patch, is_a() didn't accept string as the first argument
at all, so it always returned "false" and never triggered
__autoload(). The proposed patch didn't revert to original behavior.
It just disables autoloading and may lead to wrong result.

class a {}
class b extends a {}
var_dump(is_a("b", "a")); // it was false before 5.3.7, now it's true

I would say that the old behaviour was wrong, especially because
"instanceof" and is_subclass_of() already implemented support for
string arguments."

so your example was bogus, as passing a non-object as a first
parameter wasn't supported (see http://php.net/is_a) so your code
example depends on an undefined behavior and results in a bogus result
(is_a() alwas returned false if you passed a non-object)

so in a way it is really a BC, but I think that this change is really a bug=
fix.

--=20
Ferenc Kov=C3=A1cs
@Tyr43l - http://tyrael.hu