Changing default assertion mode to throw exceptions

I'd like to change the default mode of assertion failures to throw.
The current default is to warn. In my opinion this is a bad strategy:
the engine asserted that something that is expected to be true is not,
so executing further is a bad idea. This leaves throwing or bailing
out. I think throwing an exception is better than bailing out, so
that's what I propose.

Couldn't agree more, but I always assumed this BC break could be
too big before. Did you make any research on the impact already?

Otherwise +1

Nikita put together a search of top packagist repositories to look for assert:
https://gist.github.com/nikic/8311ee63c72573d514217456bf2df552

We can't generally know what their ini settings are, though.

In my opinion this change is worth any backwards compatibility break
as we are choosing the worst setting except for ignoring them
altogether, and can be changed back to the previous value using an
existing ini setting; we just need to put a note in the migrating
guide.

Hi Levi

I personally almost never use assert, and actually assumed it would throw an error, so this sounds like a good change!

Have you done research on how this would affect the top-1000-ish popular packages like Nikita does?

Kind regards
Brent

Hello everyone,

I'd like to change the default mode of assertion failures to throw.
The current default is to warn. In my opinion this is a bad strategy:
the engine asserted that something that is expected to be true is not,
so executing further is a bad idea. This leaves throwing or bailing
out. I think throwing an exception is better than bailing out, so
that's what I propose.

Hello, everyone. It's been a week and I have only heard a bit of
positive feedback and no pushback. Anyone else want to reply?

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On Wed, Jul 22, 2020 at 5:05 PM Gabriel Caruso carusogabriel34@gmail.com
wrote:

Hello everyone,

I'd like to change the default mode of assertion failures to throw.
The current default is to warn. In my opinion this is a bad strategy:
the engine asserted that something that is expected to be true is not,
so executing further is a bad idea. This leaves throwing or bailing
out. I think throwing an exception is better than bailing out, so
that's what I propose.

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To unsubscribe, visit: https://www.php.net/unsub.php

Hello Levi

+1 on this one, I use assertions on my local development, and we also have
that
on doctrine/coding-standard (
https://github.com/doctrine/coding-standard/pull/47).

I think throwing an exception is indeed a better way to make the most out
of it.

I'm also +1 on this change. Throwing an AssertionError is clearly the
better default experience, and changing back to the previous behavior is
super simple.

Nikita