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To: "Yasuo Ohgaki" <yohgaki@ohgaki.net>,
	"Stanislav Malyshev" <smalyshev@gmail.com>
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Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2015 05:04:46 -0500
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Array dereferencing of scalars
From: php_lists@realplain.com ("Matt Wilmas")

Hi all,

----- Original Message -----
From: "Yasuo Ohgaki"
Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2015

> Hi all,
>
> On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 6:21 AM, Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> > Would throwing a notice or a warning on array deferencing scalars
>> > be acceptable for PHP 7.0, or does this need an RFC?
>>
>> I think this does need an RFC, and for 7.0, pretty much no new language
>> changes are acceptable anymore, since we're past the timeframe.
>
>
>  <?php
>  $foo = 42;
>  $foo['bar']; // => NULL
>
> This code cannot be right.
> How about fix this as a simple bug?

I just realized this behavior a couple months ago, after being annoyed by 
"needing" to use isset() to avoid a Notice in rare cases.  (I've always 
hate, hate, hated the isset() mess just trying to assign stuff -- I wanted a 
value-returning IFset() instead!  Now we have ??, but still can't do 
var_dump($var ??).)

Anyway, I realized after checking the code that this is actually intentional 
and always has been, it seems.  Really glad that I could rely on this and it 
makes things simpler and cleaner! :-)

Note that I'm referring to accessing NULL as an array (that I'd like to rely 
on).  The other bool/int scalar without-a-notice case did/does seem a bit 
odd.

So if there's a change, how about only changing it for non-NULL values? 
Otherwise, this:

$v = NULL; $v[0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9];

is supposed to give 10 Notices?!  That's dumb, and ugly, and looks like what 
the Pull Request is doing with the updated tests.  Even worse in the case 
where the variable is undefined...

> Regards,
>
> --
> Yasuo Ohgaki

Thanks,
Matt