[RFC] Consistent null behaviour

Am 20.09.2017 um 19:23 schrieb ilija.tovilo@me.com:

I realized after sending the initial E-Mail that there might be more
breaking changes than I thought, like the one you suggested.

The same thing actually happens for bools, ints and floats:
https://3v4l.org/jvVbO

I wouldn’t depend on this behaviour since you’d get errors depending on
what is returned, like an empty array, a string, an object or resource.

i would depend on that behavior because in reality you can get back two
different things:

• a numeric array with exactly index 0
• NULL

how do you imagine mysqli_fetch_row() return empty array, string or even
object/resource? when nothing is found it's a non-empty array and
otherwise NULL

before PHP 5.6 (or PHP 5.5 not sure) these where useless multiple lines
because you needed to store the result of mysqli_fetch_row() in some var
to access key 0

Am 20.09.2017 um 19:06 schrieb ilija.tovilo@me.com:

Hi everybody!

To my surprise, I noticed today that an array access on a null
value returns null without any warning whatsoever.
Accessing the property of a null value gives you a notice, while
calling a function on that null value gives you a fatal error.

https://3v4l.org/ZSZHN

This is pretty inconsistent. IMO all of these should be fatal errors,
although I realize that might be a bit drastic for PHP 8.
We should at least give the user a notice when using array access on
a null value.

Any thoughts?
wouldn't that break code like below which is IMHO the best usecase of
the PHP 5.6 feature that you can directly access a array field of a
function result and the type-casting encsues that the return-type is
always int

function GetSKatMaxSort(int $archive=0): int
{
return (int)mysqli_fetch_row($this->db->query("select SQL_NO_CACHE
max(ssort) from {$this->db->table} where sarchive=$archive", 1))[0];
}