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Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2015 13:41:02 -0300
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To: Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me>
Cc: internals@lists.php.net
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From: pedronaroga@gmail.com (Pedro Cordeiro)

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>
> this would make the "void" keyword feel more meaningful.


I, too, had issues trying to understand what "void" was bringing to the
table. IMHO, it should warn people thinking some specific function/method
returns a value when it doesn't, not protect against some dev forgetting
the function he's writing should not return something.

IMHO, it's far more important to warn "Hey, this function returns NOTHING,
don't try to use its value because it doesn't exist!" then it is to warn
"Hey, this function can't return anything, stop trying to return things!".

Throwing an E_NOTICE when accessing a void return value would make perfect
sense, as the compiler would strict check that the function author defined
a no-return and indeed returned nothing and would also warn whoever was
calling the function that it doesn't return anything.

> We could do this, but I do wonder if it might cause a lot of E_NOTICEs to
pop up for existing code, assuming we applied this to built-in PHP
functions.

My proposal is to only throw an E_NOTICE when accessing a return value from
a function that is explicitly marked with "void". A function with no return
("return ;") but with no ": void" on the signature would not necessarily
throw an E_NOTICE.

function myFunc() { return ; }
$a = myFunc(); //NULL should be assigned to $a silently, like it is today.
function myOtherFunc() : void { return ; }
$b = myOtherFunc(); //NULL should be assigned to $b, but an E_NOTICE is
thrown.

2015-10-15 13:34 GMT-03:00 Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me>:

> Hi Pedro,
>
> Pedro Cordeiro wrote:
>
>> I've been thinking about what PHP should do when accessing the return
>> value
>> of a `void` function, and so far, I think the consistent thing should be
>> to
>> get NULL, while throwing an E_NOTICE.
>>
>
> We could do this, but I do wonder if it might cause a lot of E_NOTICEs to
> pop up for existing code, assuming we applied this to built-in PHP
> functions.
>
> I'm not sure.
>
> Thanks.
> --
> Andrea Faulds
> http://ajf.me/
>
>
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