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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Core functions throwing exceptions in PHP7
From: larry@garfieldtech.com (Larry Garfield)

On 07/24/2015 06:58 PM, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
> Hi!
>
>> On the surface, this sounds like a good thing. Although, I question that
>> if a user is not checking $result === false, then will they end up just
>> wrapping this in an empty try/catch so their code does not fail? There
>> is a mechanism to detect the error now.
> True, but not checking for false is an error of omission, and an easy
> one to make ("How can random fail? It's just creating random numbers! I
> won't bother to check"),

Another point here is that 0 is a perfectly legitimate random number in 
many cases, so callers would need to do a === check, not just a boolean 
check. How many people already forget to do that for strpos() on a daily 
basis?  Too many. :-)

Whatever the exact mechanism, a "break hard so you can't continue" 
approach seems far better in this case than a "return false and hope the 
user knows what they're doing", even if the latter is currently more 
common in PHP itself.  Especially as we're talking not about a user 
error but a "your system is not setup right so it will never work" 
situation, as I understand it.

--Larry Garfield