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Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2016 19:10:49 +0200
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To: Craig Duncan <php@duncanc.co.uk>
Cc: Leigh <leight@gmail.com>, Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Counting of non-countable objects
From: nikita.ppv@gmail.com (Nikita Popov)

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On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 12:29 PM, Craig Duncan <php@duncanc.co.uk> wrote:

> On 4 October 2016 at 11:17, Leigh <leight@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > You specifically mention that counting scalars is unaffected, is there
> > a legitimate use-case for being able to use count() on them?
> >
> > I'd say using count() on a string or an int also constitutes a hidden
> > bug, as it also always returns 1 regardless of the value.
> >
>
> I agree, and I'm happy to include scalars in the RFC if that's desired by
> the majority.
>
> Calling count() on a scalar is likely to cause a warning at some point, so
> it's not as "hidden" as the iterator example:
>
> if (count($string) > 0) {
>     foreach ($string as $value) {
>

A confounding factor is that count() has an alias sizeof() and for people
coming from a C-like background it is quite natural to try to apply
sizeof() to a string in order to get its length. This will silently "work",
but return a meaningless result.

So, definitely +1 on a warning for all non-array non-Countable cases.

Nikita

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