Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:56375
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: error (pb1.pair.com: domain lerdorf.com from 209.85.213.42 cause and error)
Sender: Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com>
Message-ID: <4EC581A2.5010707@php.net>
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:50:26 -0600
Organization: PHP Development Team
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20110929 Thunderbird/7.0.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Matthew Weier O'Phinney <weierophinney@php.net>
CC: Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com>, 
 "internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>
References: <F2.14.30628.CA275CE4@pb1.pair.com> <4EC57857.6030904@sugarcrm.com>
In-Reply-To: <4EC57857.6030904@sugarcrm.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Results of testing ZF against PHP 5.4.0RC1
From: rasmus@php.net (Rasmus Lerdorf)

On 11/17/2011 03:10 PM, Stas Malyshev wrote:
> Hi!
> 
>>     I recall from earlier discussions that Stas was in favor of reverting
>>     this change -- what's the status at this time? This single change
> 
> I was not and still am not - I think if something warrants notice this
> is exactly the case. Conversion of array to string "Array" IMHO makes no
> sense and not useful in any case, so if you code does that it's most
> probably a bug. I understand that some tests were written without
> accounting for this, but frankly in this case I think the right way
> would be to fix the tests. This is not the feature your code should rely
> on (and I think it should have never existed in PHP in the first place)
> and if we shall guarantee compatibility with every bug and bad decision
> we took in the past we won't be able to advance anywhere. I think in
> this case the inconvenience from fixing the tests is outweighed by the
> advantage of promoting better code and exposing hard-to-find bugs.

I completely agree. If you are seeing a lot of these in unit tests, then
your tests are likely not testing what you think they are.

I am seeing complaints about this notice in tests that do this:

  array_diff($a, $b)

Where either $a or $b contains nested arrays. The thing with this is
that this really is not doing what you think it is when you feed it
nested arrays.  For example:

$a = [1,2,[3]];
$b = [1,2,[4]];

This ends up comparing [1,2,'Array'] against [1,2,'Array'] and these two
arrays are thus identical as far as array_diff() is concerned. Or even
worse:

$a = [1,2,'Array'];
$b = [1,2,[4,5,6,7,8,9]];

Again, array_diff() is going to tell you that there is no difference
between $a and $b. This seems like an obvious case where we issue a
NOTICE telling the user that the code probably didn't do what they
wanted it to.

-Rasmus