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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] 5.4 regression: non-existent sub-sub keys now have
 values
From: rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf)

On 11/24/2011 12:12 PM, Larry Garfield wrote:
> On 11/23/2011 12:13 PM, Lester Caine wrote:
>> Richard Quadling wrote:
>>> I agree with Daniel on this.
>>>
>>> Just looking for any test relating to isset() to see what tests will
>>> now fail.
>>
>> So it's not just me :)
>> I am seeing this break real world projects and can't see a easy way to
>> fix the break. There is nothing really wrong with the current code
>> except that the sub keys have yet to be populated.
> 
> This is going to be a huge problem for Drupal.  Drupal uses deep
> associative array structures a lot, by design.  That means we isset() or
> empty() on arrays a lot.  I haven't had a chance to test it yet, but I
> see this change breaking, um, A LOT.  And as Daniel noted, the fix is to
> turn one line of very readable code into 8 lines of hard to read code.
> 
> This is not a step forward by any metric I can imagine.  It's changing
> long-standing behavior for no real benefit I can see except perhaps
> strict adherence to a doc page.  However, PHP has always been an
> "implementation is the standard" language, which means this is a
> language API change.
> 
> Please roll it back to avoid breaking a crapton of existing, legitimate,
> non-buggy code.

I had a quick look through the Drupal code. I don't see a single place
that this is done where a deeply nested array index is applied to a
string. I think you are misunderstanding what has changed here.

-Rasmus