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Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2011 23:23:10 +0100
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To: Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@php.net>
Cc: "Matthew Weier O'Phinney" <weierophinney@php.net>, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com>, 
	"internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Results of testing ZF against PHP 5.4.0RC1
From: patrickallaert@php.net (Patrick ALLAERT)

2011/11/17 Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@php.net>:
> On 11/17/2011 03:10 PM, Stas Malyshev wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>>> =C2=A0 =C2=A0 I recall from earlier discussions that Stas was in favor =
of reverting
>>> =C2=A0 =C2=A0 this change -- what's the status at this time? This singl=
e 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:
>
> =C2=A0array_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. =C2=A0For example:
>
> $a =3D [1,2,[3]];
> $b =3D [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 =3D [1,2,'Array'];
> $b =3D [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

Stas and Rasmus summarized my point of view very well when I proposed
that patch.
Note that this change should have be a one liner, but it turns out to
be a much bigger work [1] because of internal tests also relying on
this conversion not to complain.

[1] http://svn.php.net/viewvc?view=3Drevision&revision=3D318288

--=20
Patrick