[RFC] Deprecations for PHP 7.1

10 years ago by Nikita Popov — view source — reply

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Hi internals!

I've created a bulk-deprecation RFC for PHP 7.1:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecations_php_7_1

I'm using this RFC to collect various deprecations targeting PHP 7.1, as
having individual RFCs for these is too much management overhead. Each
deprecated feature will get its own vote, of course.

This RFC is incomplete -- I'm posting it now so people can suggest other
things that should be deprecated. I expect it to grow over time and don't
plan to vote on it in the immediate future.

Thanks,
Nikita

10 years ago by Zeev Suraski — view source — reply

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-----Original Message-----
From: Nikita Popov [mailto:nikita.ppv@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 18, 2016 2:42 PM
To: PHP internals internals@lists.php.net
Subject: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Deprecations for PHP 7.1

Hi internals!

I've created a bulk-deprecation RFC for PHP 7.1:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecations_php_7_1

I'm using this RFC to collect various deprecations targeting PHP 7.1, as having
individual RFCs for these is too much management overhead. Each deprecated
feature will get its own vote, of course.

This RFC is incomplete -- I'm posting it now so people can suggest other things
that should be deprecated. I expect it to grow over time and don't plan to vote
on it in the immediate future.

How do you envision discussing each of those though? Should we discuss each proposal as it becomes available?

Zeev

10 years ago by Thomas Bley — view source — reply

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Nikita Popov wrote on 18.02.2016 13:41:

Hi internals!

I've created a bulk-deprecation RFC for PHP 7.1:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecations_php_7_1

I'm using this RFC to collect various deprecations targeting PHP 7.1, as
having individual RFCs for these is too much management overhead. Each
deprecated feature will get its own vote, of course.

This RFC is incomplete -- I'm posting it now so people can suggest other
things that should be deprecated. I expect it to grow over time and don't
plan to vote on it in the immediate future.

Thanks,
Nikita

I'm proposing:
allow_url_include

Regards
Thomas

10 years ago by Andrea Faulds — view source — reply

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Hi Nikita,

Nikita Popov wrote:

I've created a bulk-deprecation RFC for PHP 7.1:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecations_php_7_1

I'd be fine with getting rid of all of the ones suggested so far
(__autoload, $php_errormsg, create_function, rand/srand).

I've actually used create_function on occasion for programmatically
generating functions (in particular to create a function for each PHP
operator), but it's trivially polyfillable, and it'd be better if people
were implementing it themselves (and thus knowing it's based on eval())
than using it directly without this knowledge.

Regarding rand() and srand(), I'm fine with getting rid of them. Note
that we should also deprecate getrandmax() at the same time, though.
It's the function which returns the C RAND_MAX constant.

I'm using this RFC to collect various deprecations targeting PHP 7.1, as
having individual RFCs for these is too much management overhead. Each
deprecated feature will get its own vote, of course.

This RFC is incomplete -- I'm posting it now so people can suggest other
things that should be deprecated. I expect it to grow over time and don't
plan to vote on it in the immediate future.

Hmm. Well, if we're doing mass deprecations, maybe we should finally get
rid of hebrev() and hebrevc()? It feels out-of-place to have a
poorly-documented standard library function specifically for converting
between two different legacy 8-bit encodings used for Hebrew, especially
when one of them is just the other with nl2br() included! Users who need
to convert between different variants of ISO-8859-8 can use iconv()
instead, or perhaps use a userland polyfill of hebrev/c().

That said, hebrev/c() might be used a lot in legacy code, and there's
probably little harm in keeping it. Similarly, we have utf8_decode() and
utf8_encode() for converting between ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8, which could
also be replaced with iconv(), but they're probably heavily used.

Even if we don't get rid of or deprecate any of those functions, they
should probably be moved into a more appropriate section of ext/ and the
manual.

Thanks!

--
Andrea Faulds
https://ajf.me/

10 years ago by Fleshgrinder — view source — reply

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Hash: SHA256

Nikita Popov wrote:

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecations_php_7_1

I've actually used create_function on occasion for
programmatically generating functions (in particular to create a
function for each PHP operator), but it's trivially polyfillable,
and it'd be better if people were implementing it themselves (and
thus knowing it's based on eval()) than using it directly without
this knowledge.

Regarding rand() and srand(), I'm fine with getting rid of them.
Note that we should also deprecate getrandmax() at the same time,
though. It's the function which returns the C RAND_MAX constant.

Hmm. Well, if we're doing mass deprecations, maybe we should
finally get rid of hebrev() and hebrevc()? It feels out-of-place to
have a poorly-documented standard library function specifically for
converting between two different legacy 8-bit encodings used for
Hebrew, especially when one of them is just the other with nl2br()
included! Users who need to convert between different variants of
ISO-8859-8 can use iconv() instead, or perhaps use a userland
polyfill of hebrev/c().

That said, hebrev/c() might be used a lot in legacy code, and
there's probably little harm in keeping it. Similarly, we have
utf8_decode() and utf8_encode() for converting between ISO-8859-1
and UTF-8, which could also be replaced with iconv(), but they're
probably heavily used.

Even if we don't get rid of or deprecate any of those functions,
they should probably be moved into a more appropriate section of
ext/ and the manual.

Thanks!

+1 for all that are in the RFC and I would like to second Andrea’s
proposals. All of them including utf8_encode() and utf8_decode().
Those two are used incorrectly in most cases I encounter them. People
seem to assume that they are able to encode anything to proper UTF-8
when calling utf8_encode().

There are more questionable string functions available:

- quotemeta() -- bad function name and purpose is unclear.
- convert_cyr_string() -- iconv() again ...

Candidates for moving to appropriate section of ext/ (or PECL) since
they are all kind of special and nothing a normal program would ever
need. Especially since they target English only and there are much
better algorithms and tools available to work with such use cases.

- levenshtein()
- metaphone()
- similar_text()
- soundex()

Richard "Fleshgrinder" Fussenegger
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10 years ago by johannes@schlueters.de — view source — reply

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I've actually used create_function on occasion for programmatically
generating functions (in particular to create a function for each PHP
operator), but it's trivially polyfillable, and it'd be better if
people
were implementing it themselves (and thus knowing it's based on
eval())
than using it directly without this knowledge.

Just as a detail: You can't create a 100% compatible polyfill to
create_function(). create_function() names functions starting with \0.
Functions starting with \0 are hidden from get_defined_functions() and
possibly other places.

php > echo sizeof(get_defined_functions()['user']);
0
php > create_function('', '');
php > echo sizeof(get_defined_functions()['user']);
0
php > eval('function foo() {}');
php > echo sizeof(get_defined_functions()['user']);
1

johannes

10 years ago by Stephen Coakley — view source — reply

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I've actually used create_function on occasion for programmatically
generating functions (in particular to create a function for each PHP
operator), but it's trivially polyfillable, and it'd be better if
people
were implementing it themselves (and thus knowing it's based on
eval())
than using it directly without this knowledge.

Just as a detail: You can't create a 100% compatible polyfill to
create_function(). create_function() names functions starting with \0.
Functions starting with \0 are hidden from get_defined_functions() and
possibly other places.

php > echo sizeof(get_defined_functions()['user']);
0
php > create_function('', '');
php > echo sizeof(get_defined_functions()['user']);
0
php > eval('function foo() {}');
php > echo sizeof(get_defined_functions()['user']);
1

johannes

Good point. Another approach to a polyfill would be to use a closure then:

function create_function(string $args, string $code)
{
return eval("return function($args) { $code };");
}

$newfunc = create_function('$a,$b', 'return "ln($a) + ln($b) = " .
log($a * $b);');
echo $newfunc(2, M_E) . "\n";

Not a complete polyfill, since $newfunc is a closure and not a string,
so you cannot print out the function name. I have no idea if any code
relies on the lambda itself being a string though.

--
Stephen

10 years ago by johannes@schlueters.de — view source — reply

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Not a complete polyfill, since $newfunc is a closure and not a string,
so you cannot print out the function name. I have no idea if any code
relies on the lambda itself being a string though.

This has impact on a few things, i.e. Reflection or users might guess
the name. Anyways: Take away: A polyfill won't be 100% identical.

However the typical use case should be around usort() or similar where
this doesn't matter.

johannes

10 years ago by Stephen Coakley — view source — reply

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Not a complete polyfill, since $newfunc is a closure and not a string,
so you cannot print out the function name. I have no idea if any code
relies on the lambda itself being a string though.

This has impact on a few things, i.e. Reflection or users might guess
the name. Anyways: Take away: A polyfill won't be 100% identical.

However the typical use case should be around usort() or similar where
this doesn't matter.

johannes

I'm not entirely sure about what you mean. On my system, create_function
returns something like '\x00lambda_1'. Do you mean that users are
guessing such a string in order to use it? Sounds like the smelliest of
code smells.

--
Stephen

10 years ago by johannes@schlueters.de — view source — reply

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Sounds like the smelliest of
code smells.

Considering what I've seen (and in some cases done myself to outsmart my
later self) I wouldn't be surprised if some did. :-)

We can't imagine all the creativity of PHP users,

johannes

10 years ago by Rowan Collins — view source — reply

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I'm not entirely sure about what you mean. On my system,
create_function returns something like '\x00lambda_1'. Do you mean
that users are guessing such a string in order to use it? Sounds like
the smelliest of code smells.

Maybe not constructing it, but detecting it? I'm not sure why you'd
need to tell the difference between a create_function "lambda" and a
Closure instance, but somebody somehwere might have hacked it in.

Regards,

--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]

10 years ago by Stanislav Malyshev — view source — reply

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Hi!

I've created a bulk-deprecation RFC for PHP 7.1:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecations_php_7_1

I like dropping php_errormsg. Last time I tried to make error
suppression work more efficiently this was a major problematic thing
AFAIR, and in general using magic variables that pop out of nowhere is
not a good thing.

For __autoload I guess since it's incompatible with superior SPL
mechanism it has to go too.

I'm not sure about create_function() - while it is old, I don't see why
we should break working code using it just because better option is
available.

With rand functions, I don't think we need to touch them. For some
applications, low-key randomness is just fine - if you need to shuffle
array of 20 elements or randomize unit test to ensure you're not testing
same value all the time, low-quality randomness is completely fine. For
other applications, there are superior solutions and everybody who needs
them already uses them, but again I see no value in removing those
functions. It would only cause more breakage and make adoption of new
versions (already horrible) even slower.

--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@gmail.com

10 years ago by Zeev Suraski — view source — reply

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Hi internals!

I've created a bulk-deprecation RFC for PHP 7.1:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecations_php_7_1

I'm using this RFC to collect various deprecations targeting PHP 7.1, as
having individual RFCs for these is too much management overhead. Each
deprecated feature will get its own vote, of course.

This RFC is incomplete -- I'm posting it now so people can suggest other
things that should be deprecated. I expect it to grow over time and don't
plan to vote on it in the immediate future.

Following up on what I wrote earlier, I think we need to separate the discussion of each topic to its own thread. Some threads will be simple with not much discussion, with others probably resulting in more discussion. It's quite messy to discuss so many items (with the list growing and growing) in one thread.

It's fine to keep it as one centralized RFC (and probably a good idea), but let's keep the discussions separate.

Zeev

10 years ago by francois@php.net — view source — reply

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Hi,

Le 18/02/2016 13:41, Nikita Popov a écrit :

This RFC is incomplete -- I'm posting it now so people can suggest other
things that should be deprecated. I expect it to grow over time and don't
plan to vote on it in the immediate future.

May I suggest to remove the second argument of spl_autoload() ?

spl_autoload() is typically called from the PHP core only, and the core
never sets this argument. File extensions to consider are set using
spl_autoload_extensions(). So, the 2nd argument of spl_autoload() is
useless and probably never used anywhere.

The problem with this argument is that it creates an annoying issue when
thinking about a way to extend autoloading to other symbol types (namely
functions and constants). The easiest way to extend autoloading to other
types is to add an optional second argument to autoloaders. For a
perfect BC, the core would call an autoloader for non-class symbols only
if the function accepts 2 arguments. This way, we can achieve full
backwards and forward compatibility with existing autoloaders. The
pre-requisite is that currently existing autoloaders take only one arg,
hence my suggestion to remove the second argument of spl_autoload()
(spl_autoload() will remain a class-only autoloader).

Regards

François

10 years ago by Andrea Faulds — view source — reply

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Hi Nikita,

Nikita Popov wrote:

This RFC is incomplete -- I'm posting it now so people can suggest other
things that should be deprecated. I expect it to grow over time and don't
plan to vote on it in the immediate future.

I think this would be a good opportunity to look at our existing php.ini
directives, with view to getting rid of some more of them eventually.

Three in particular spring to mind:

precision and serialize_precision - These determine how many
digits are printed when outputting floating-point numbers.
- serialize_precision is used when serialising or exporting
  numbers, and would seem to exist solely to allow you to shoot yourself
  in the foot, by discarding possibly important information when
  serialising - an operation that's supposed to perfectly reproduce a value!
- precision is used in other contexts, and is more problematic,
  because its default value is 14 which is less than the maximum number of
  decimal digits in a PHP float. This means that, by default, PHP doesn't
  print floats to their full precision - including in var_dump(). This can
  create unreasonable confusion when debugging (why are two numbers that
  appear identical with var_dump() reported as inequal?), means
  potentially important information is removed by default, and really
  ought not to be a global setting anyway: if you want to format your
  numbers with reduced precision, do so explicitly.
- Both of these are settings which code may implicitly depend on and
  break when they are changed. The manual is unhelpful here, because it
  doesn't warn you that precision is used when floats on any page except
  that for php.ini!
mbstring.func_overload - This piece of magic replaces the standard
string functions with their mb_* equivalents. It is the character
encodings equivalent of magic quotes: it simply assumes that all string
operations on binary strings, if replaced by "multi-byte" versions, will
suddenly handle character encodings properly. They won't necessarily, so
this is quite a reckless setting. Worse, this setting prevents you from
using the normal, non-"multi-byte" string functions when you need them
for binary data, so PHP packages which deal with binary data are broken
when this php.ini setting is turned on. Luckily, apps which rely on this
setting being on could be easily fixed: by using find/replace.

There might be others worth dealing with, too, these are just the first
three I thought of.

Thanks.

--
Andrea Faulds
https://ajf.me/

10 years ago by Stanislav Malyshev — view source — reply

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Hi!

foot, by discarding possibly important information when serialising - an
operation that's supposed to perfectly reproduce a value!

I'm not sure this is correct. Also, for values that are not exactly
representable in binary, I'm not sure you want to see
0.1000000000000000055511151231257827021181583404541015625 instead of
0.1. You certainly don't want var_dump to print that by default - this
would make display cluttred and have very high WTF factor - why I
entered 0.1 and get this enormous snake of a number? PHP must be broken!
Moreover, when you do "$a = 8.2 - 0.2" and then print/send $a, do you
want to see 8 or 7.99999999999999911182158029987476766109466552734375?

In fact, when we represent 0.1 as 0.1 when serializing our outputting,
we are not discarding information, on the contrary - we are preserving
exactly the information that was given to us by user.

print floats to their full precision - including in var_dump(). This can
create unreasonable confusion when debugging (why are two numbers that
appear identical with var_dump() reported as inequal?), means

You really think that displaying 8.2 - 0.2 as 8 is more confusing than
displaying it as 7.99999999999999911182158029987476766109466552734375?

potentially important information is removed by default, and really
ought not to be a global setting anyway: if you want to format your
numbers with reduced precision, do so explicitly.

That would mean optimizing for case that nobody wants, and de-optimizing
case that pretty much everybody wants. Ask 100 people using PHP what
they want as a result of 8.2 - 0.2 and count how many of them want to
see full-precision monster of a number.

There might be others worth dealing with, too, these are just the first
three I thought of.

I would very much advise not to mess with any options until we are
definitely, 100%, without any doubt sure that nobody needs to use it for
anything. Removing options earns us nothing in terms of functionality.
If nobody uses them - ok, fine - drop them. If we need to remove them
e.g. because component they address goes away or changes function in a
way that makes it irrelevent - fine, drop them. But doing it just
because very small number of people that we can engage in discussion on
the list (and that's not going to ever change - PHP user community is
vastly larger than people even reading this list, let alone actively
participating in it) think it's not needed IMHO is a very wrong
approach. Sometimes we have no choice but to take decisions with this
incomplete knowledge - but here we have a perfectly good option of just
leaving it alone. All other options should be weighted against it.

--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@gmail.com

10 years ago by Andrea Faulds — view source — reply

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Hi Stas,

Stanislav Malyshev wrote:

Hi!

foot, by discarding possibly important information when serialising - an
operation that's supposed to perfectly reproduce a value!

I'm not sure this is correct. Also, for values that are not exactly
representable in binary, I'm not sure you want to see
0.1000000000000000055511151231257827021181583404541015625 instead of
0.1.

This assumes we would print an exact decimal representation, but that's
far more than necessary. In order to get the same result when converted
back to a float, we need at most 17 digits. In many cases we don't even
need to show 17, because there are not that many digits in a
full-precision decimal representation (e.g. 0.5). We could use less in
many cases if PHP were to switch to the approach other languages use,
where we output only the shortest sequence of digits producing the same
value when converted back to a float (whereas currently we output in
full precision, up to 17 significant figures).

You certainly don't want var_dump to print that by default - this
would make display cluttred and have very high WTF factor

Why would displaying at most three extra digits have a "high WTF factor"?

why I
entered 0.1 and get this enormous snake of a number?
PHP must be broken!

var_dump() is a debugging function. If it shows a value, it must
represent it accurately. Otherwise:

$ php -r 'var_dump(1.00000000000002, 1.00000000000001, 1.00000000000001
=== 1.00000000000002);'
float(1)
float(1)
bool(true)

Please explain to me why this is intuitive and reasonable behaviour for
a debugging function.

Furthermore, if PHP developers find floating-point confusing and are
genuinely surprised that 0.1 cannot be represented in binary exactly,
then perhaps they should go and learn about what floating-point numbers
do, rather than naïvely continuing on thinking they're decimals thanks
to PHP lying to them! It is not the job of the language to try and hide
that floats are imprecise from programmers.

Moreover, when you do "$a = 8.2 - 0.2" and then print/send $a, do you
want to see 8 or 7.99999999999999911182158029987476766109466552734375?

Let's look at what our contemporary programming languages do.

Python:

8.2 - 0.2
7.999999999999999

JavaScript:

8.2 - 0.2
7.999999999999999

That's much shorter than your suggestion.

Heck, let's look at what var_export() does:

$ php -r 'var_export(8.2 - 0.2);'
7.9999999999999991

Still a lot shorter.

In fact, when we represent 0.1 as 0.1 when serializing our outputting,

But we don't represent 0.1 as 0.1:

$ php -r 'var_export(0.1);'
0.10000000000000001

we are not discarding information, on the contrary - we are preserving
exactly the information that was given to us by user.

$ php -r 'var_dump(1.00000000000002);'
float(1)

That doesn't look very preserved to me.

print floats to their full precision - including in var_dump(). This can
create unreasonable confusion when debugging (why are two numbers that
appear identical with var_dump() reported as inequal?), means

You really think that displaying 8.2 - 0.2 as 8 is more confusing than
displaying it as 7.99999999999999911182158029987476766109466552734375?

It's more honest. If two values are different, they should not be
displayed the same.

And, again, the result would not be that large:

$ php -r 'var_export(8.2 - 0.2);'
7.9999999999999991

potentially important information is removed by default, and really
ought not to be a global setting anyway: if you want to format your
numbers with reduced precision, do so explicitly.

That would mean optimizing for case that nobody wants, and de-optimizing
case that pretty much everybody wants.

Who wants to round numbers to the same precision in all situations, for
all apps running on their server, for all code running within a given
request, even in libraries?

Ask 100 people using PHP what
they want as a result of 8.2 - 0.2 and count how many of them want to
see full-precision monster of a number.

"7.9999999999999991" isn't that monstrous, and it could be even less so
if PHP used a nicer float-to-string conversion approach.

There might be others worth dealing with, too, these are just the first
three I thought of.

I would very much advise not to mess with any options until we are
definitely, 100%, without any doubt sure that nobody needs to use it for
anything. Removing options earns us nothing in terms of functionality.
If nobody uses them - ok, fine - drop them. If we need to remove them
e.g. because component they address goes away or changes function in a
way that makes it irrelevent - fine, drop them. But doing it just
because very small number of people that we can engage in discussion on
the list (and that's not going to ever change - PHP user community is
vastly larger than people even reading this list, let alone actively
participating in it) think it's not needed IMHO is a very wrong
approach.

This might be a fine argument, but I'm not arguing these settings are
not needed. I'm arguing they're actively harmful.

--
Andrea Faulds
https://ajf.me/

10 years ago by Andrea Faulds — view source — reply

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Hi,

Andrea Faulds wrote:

$ php -r 'var_dump(1.00000000000002, 1.00000000000001, 1.00000000000001
=== 1.00000000000002);'
float(1)
float(1)
bool(true)

I missed this when proof-reading. The output is actually:

php -r 'var_dump(1.00000000000002, 1.00000000000001, 1.00000000000001
=== 1.00000000000002);'
float(1)
float(1)
bool(false)

Which reflects the point I was trying to make (two numbers that are NOT
exactly equal according to === are printed identically by var_dump()).

I made a mistake in my original email, sorry.

--
Andrea Faulds
https://ajf.me/

10 years ago by Lester Caine — view source — reply

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Furthermore, if PHP developers find floating-point confusing and are
genuinely surprised that 0.1 cannot be represented in binary exactly,
then perhaps they should go and learn about what floating-point numbers
do, rather than naïvely continuing on thinking they're decimals thanks
to PHP lying to them! It is not the job of the language to try and hide
that floats are imprecise from programmers.

This just about sums up my understanding on the differences between a
programmer and a software engineer. There are fundamental limits to each
of the different hardware platforms one is running code on, so
'assuming' that the answers you get are always the same simply proves
one still has to learn how to program. SQL addressed many of these
differences early on, and things like fractional currency fields being
managed as integers with a fixed fractional offsets ( NUMBER(8,3) )
which accurately record 'tenth of a cent' provide clean interfaces, but
all too often they get transferred into 'float' because it's 'easier to
handle'. That PHP makes some of these conversions transparently IS the
problem of the language, but often it's because the programmer is simply
ignorant of why the original methods were adopted?

BIGINT is an example of where there are different understandings of just
what a number is, and trying to add unlimited accuracy is not a
substitution to the fact that when accessed from a database a BIGINT is
simply a clean 64bit number. Float has the same limitations based on
just what hardware is providing it?

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL

Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
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10 years ago by Fleshgrinder — view source — reply

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Furthermore, if PHP developers find floating-point confusing and are
genuinely surprised that 0.1 cannot be represented in binary exactly,
then perhaps they should go and learn about what floating-point numbers
do, rather than naïvely continuing on thinking they're decimals thanks
to PHP lying to them! It is not the job of the language to try and hide
that floats are imprecise from programmers.

+1 for removing the options and on the RFC. I have to deal with float
comparisons and BIGINT being cast to (int) in PHP every day and people
simply do not get it. The language should be brutal when it comes to
these things and warn, throw exceptions, whatever. :P

--
Richard "Fleshgrinder" Fussenegger

10 years ago by Yasuo Ohgaki — view source — reply

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Hi,

foot, by discarding possibly important information when serialising - an
operation that's supposed to perfectly reproduce a value!

I'm not sure this is correct. Also, for values that are not exactly
representable in binary, I'm not sure you want to see
0.1000000000000000055511151231257827021181583404541015625 instead of
0.1. You certainly don't want var_dump to print that by default - this
would make display cluttred and have very high WTF factor - why I
entered 0.1 and get this enormous snake of a number? PHP must be broken!
Moreover, when you do "$a = 8.2 - 0.2" and then print/send $a, do you
want to see 8 or 7.99999999999999911182158029987476766109466552734375?

In fact, when we represent 0.1 as 0.1 when serializing our outputting,
we are not discarding information, on the contrary - we are preserving
exactly the information that was given to us by user.

print floats to their full precision - including in var_dump(). This can
create unreasonable confusion when debugging (why are two numbers that
appear identical with var_dump() reported as inequal?), means

You really think that displaying 8.2 - 0.2 as 8 is more confusing than
displaying it as 7.99999999999999911182158029987476766109466552734375?

potentially important information is removed by default, and really
ought not to be a global setting anyway: if you want to format your
numbers with reduced precision, do so explicitly.

That would mean optimizing for case that nobody wants, and de-optimizing
case that pretty much everybody wants. Ask 100 people using PHP what
they want as a result of 8.2 - 0.2 and count how many of them want to
see full-precision monster of a number.

There might be others worth dealing with, too, these are just the first
three I thought of.

I would very much advise not to mess with any options until we are
definitely, 100%, without any doubt sure that nobody needs to use it for
anything. Removing options earns us nothing in terms of functionality.
If nobody uses them - ok, fine - drop them. If we need to remove them
e.g. because component they address goes away or changes function in a
way that makes it irrelevent - fine, drop them. But doing it just
because very small number of people that we can engage in discussion on
the list (and that's not going to ever change - PHP user community is
vastly larger than people even reading this list, let alone actively
participating in it) think it's not needed IMHO is a very wrong
approach. Sometimes we have no choice but to take decisions with this
incomplete knowledge - but here we have a perfectly good option of just
leaving it alone. All other options should be weighted against it.

This discussion is related to

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/precise_float_value

If you have comment on this, I appreciate it.
Please search old thread for discussions.
I'll start final RFC discussion for this when session RFC is finished.

Regards,

--
Yasuo Ohgaki
yohgaki@ohgaki.net

10 years ago by Andrea Faulds — view source — reply

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Hi Yasuo,

Yasuo Ohgaki wrote:

This discussion is related to

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/precise_float_value

If you have comment on this, I appreciate it.
Please search old thread for discussions.
I'll start final RFC discussion for this when session RFC is finished.

Thank you for bringing that RFC up again, it would improve this
situation somewhat. Particularly in that it would use the "0" precision
for zend_dtoa, which is the "shortest sequence of digits producing the
same value when converted back to a float" behaviour that I mentioned in
my email.

--
Andrea Faulds
https://ajf.me/

10 years ago by Andrea Faulds — view source — reply

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Hi again,

Andrea Faulds wrote:

Hi Yasuo,

Yasuo Ohgaki wrote:

This discussion is related to

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/precise_float_value

If you have comment on this, I appreciate it.
Please search old thread for discussions.
I'll start final RFC discussion for this when session RFC is finished.

Thank you for bringing that RFC up again, it would improve this
situation somewhat. Particularly in that it would use the "0" precision
for zend_dtoa, which is the "shortest sequence of digits producing the
same value when converted back to a float" behaviour that I mentioned in
my email.

This article has a good explanation of the two different approaches:

http://blog.reverberate.org/2016/02/06/floating-point-demystified-part2.html

--
Andrea Faulds
https://ajf.me/

10 years ago by Yasuo Ohgaki — view source — reply

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Hi Andrea,

Andrea Faulds wrote:

Hi Yasuo,

Yasuo Ohgaki wrote:

This discussion is related to

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/precise_float_value

If you have comment on this, I appreciate it.
Please search old thread for discussions.
I'll start final RFC discussion for this when session RFC is finished.

Thank you for bringing that RFC up again, it would improve this
situation somewhat. Particularly in that it would use the "0" precision
for zend_dtoa, which is the "shortest sequence of digits producing the
same value when converted back to a float" behaviour that I mentioned in
my email.

This article has a good explanation of the two different approaches:

http://blog.reverberate.org/2016/02/06/floating-point-demystified-part2.html

Nice article!
Added URL to reference section of the RFC.

Regards,

--
Yasuo Ohgaki
yohgaki@ohgaki.net

10 years ago by Stephen Coakley — view source — reply

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Hi internals!

I've created a bulk-deprecation RFC for PHP 7.1:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecations_php_7_1

I'm using this RFC to collect various deprecations targeting PHP 7.1, as
having individual RFCs for these is too much management overhead. Each
deprecated feature will get its own vote, of course.

This RFC is incomplete -- I'm posting it now so people can suggest other
things that should be deprecated. I expect it to grow over time and don't
plan to vote on it in the immediate future.

Thanks,
Nikita

My stance on deprecations:

It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more
to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

I'd say any function that provides duplicate functionality, or
encourages bad practice, should be deprecated. Keeping the standard
library clean and focused is ideal.

--
Stephen

10 years ago by Tony Marston — view source — reply

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"Stephen Coakley" wrote in message
news:DB.F0.25279.8C0D9D65@pb1.pair.com...

Hi internals!

I've created a bulk-deprecation RFC for PHP 7.1:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecations_php_7_1

I'm using this RFC to collect various deprecations targeting PHP 7.1, as
having individual RFCs for these is too much management overhead. Each
deprecated feature will get its own vote, of course.

This RFC is incomplete -- I'm posting it now so people can suggest other
things that should be deprecated. I expect it to grow over time and don't
plan to vote on it in the immediate future.

Thanks,
Nikita

My stance on deprecations:

It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more
to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

I'd say any function that provides duplicate functionality, or encourages
bad practice, should be deprecated. Keeping the standard library clean and
focused is ideal.

But who decides what is "bad" practice and what is not? It is impossible for
ANY language to prevent a bad programmer from writing bad code, so the only
way to prevent bad code 100% would be to have a language that did nothing at
all.

Deprecating something just because you don't like is NOT a good enough
reason.

--
Tony Marston

10 years ago by Zeev Suraski — view source — reply

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Hi!

I've created a bulk-deprecation RFC for PHP 7.1:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecations_php_7_1

I like dropping php_errormsg. Last time I tried to make error
suppression work more efficiently this was a major problematic thing
AFAIR, and in general using magic variables that pop out of nowhere is
not a good thing.

I think we need to try and get an idea for the popularity of it before deprecating it, as well as get an idea for what kind of performance benefits it would bring (price/performance for making this change).

For __autoload I guess since it's incompatible with superior SPL
mechanism it has to go too.

Agreed.

I'm not sure about create_function() - while it is old, I don't see why
we should break working code using it just because better option is
available.

There's that, and there's the fact closures don't give you the same functionality - as Andrea pointed out. I think deprecating it and forcing people to rewrite their code differently (either with eval or with closures) doesn't make a whole lot of sense when create_function() works perfectly well. In terms of security risks, if you use it like you use closures I don't think it's any riskier. If you need eval() for programmatically creating functions - it would obviously be at the exact same risk levels. So we're left with marginal performance gains - as practically speaking you don't typically create thousands of functions dynamically in a given request. If you do, chances are you've already migrated to closures.

With rand functions, I don't think we need to touch them. For some
applications, low-key randomness is just fine - if you need to shuffle
array of 20 elements or randomize unit test to ensure you're not testing
same value all the time, low-quality randomness is completely fine. For
other applications, there are superior solutions and everybody who needs
them already uses them, but again I see no value in removing those
functions. It would only cause more breakage and make adoption of new
versions (already horrible) even slower.

I think the obvious option here is to make rand() and srand() aliases to rand_mt() and srand_mt(), unless I'm missing something very basic, unless I'm missing something very basic here..? I see zero reason to deprecate them and break so much code when we can simply 'upgrade' them at zero cost to both us and users.

I think that this is something we should try to do in general, by the way. Deprecating is easy, upgrading is not - and we should strive to minimize code breaks as much as possible. If we can reimplement an old functionality in a new and better and seamlessly provide a painless upgrade experience we should always prefer it to forcing the users to edit their code.

Zeev

10 years ago by Nikita Popov — view source — reply

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With rand functions, I don't think we need to touch them. For some
applications, low-key randomness is just fine - if you need to shuffle
array of 20 elements or randomize unit test to ensure you're not testing
same value all the time, low-quality randomness is completely fine. For
other applications, there are superior solutions and everybody who needs
them already uses them, but again I see no value in removing those
functions. It would only cause more breakage and make adoption of new
versions (already horrible) even slower.

I think the obvious option here is to make rand() and srand() aliases to
rand_mt() and srand_mt(), unless I'm missing something very basic, unless
I'm missing something very basic here..? I see zero reason to deprecate
them and break so much code when we can simply 'upgrade' them at zero cost
to both us and users.

The usual argument against aliasing rand() to mt_rand() is that it will
change the sequence that is generated for a specific srand() seed, thus
breaking code that relies on specific sequences. However, as removing the
functions in the future would break the code anyway, I think I agree with
you that just aliasing them is a better option.

We may need to discuss our non-cryptographic PRNG functionality anyway,
there's quite a number of issues:

rand(), the first function anyone will try, uses a potentially horrible
libc RNG
It was recently noticed that the mt_rand() implementation contains a
typo and our output differs from the original well-researched algorithm. As
yet it is unclear what that typo does to the quality of the output.
mt_getrandmax() is 2^31-1 even on 64-bit machines and numbers are scaled
using floating point multiplication. That means if you tell mt_rand() to
generate a 64-bit random numbers by specifying the range, only a tiny
fraction of numbers can actually be hit. I also strongly suspect that the
floating point scaling is inherently non-uniform even for smaller ranges.
Functions like array_rand() or shuffle() use rand() and not mt_rand(),
so if you're on Windows and your array is larger than some 30k elements the
output will likely be severely biased.
The array_rand() implementation is O(N) even if you only choose a single
key (likely by far the most common case). If you use array_rand() on a 1M
element array, we'll generate 0.5M random numbers on average.

Even though changing our PRNG implementations will break seed sequences, I
think the time has come to clean up this mess for 7.1. (We might also want
to consider to alias rand and mt_rand to an entirely new algorithm, not
MT19937. Nowadays PRNGs are available that have both better statistical
properties and are faster than MT.)

On a different note, I don't think that philosophical discussions on the
topic of how much we ought to be deprecating will be very productive --
this is one of those topics people tend to be very stubborn about ;) Some
people value stability above everything else, and for others the number one
evil in PHP is our reluctance to get rid of old ---crap--- cruft. It would
be nice if we could let voting decide that question, and keep this thread
focused on specific issues and suggestion. I.e. on one hand suggestions for
things that we may want to deprecate, together with reasoning for why we
should do it. And on the other hand alternatives to deprecation (your
suggestion for rand), reasons why something shouldn't be deprecated (e.g.
functionality not otherwise available, see hebrev; or migration would be
problematic because XYZ; or project ABC uses this heavily because ...)

Thanks,
Nikita

10 years ago by Andrea Faulds — view source — reply

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Hi Nikita,

Nikita Popov wrote:

rand(), the first function anyone will try, uses a potentially horrible
libc RNG

The manual could really be better here. It mentions that rand()'s
maximum output might be quite small on platforms like Windows, whereas
it ought to recommend mt_rand() in most cases.

It was recently noticed that the mt_rand() implementation contains a
typo and our output differs from the original well-researched algorithm. As
yet it is unclear what that typo does to the quality of the output.

I'm not a statistician, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But
from an amateur analysis, it seems to have fairly uniform output:

https://www.reddit.com/r/lolphp/comments/46fxi8/typofixing_commit_in_mersenne_twister_rng_code_is/d0552tb

mt_getrandmax() is 2^31-1 even on 64-bit machines and numbers are scaled
using floating point multiplication. That means if you tell mt_rand() to
generate a 64-bit random numbers by specifying the range, only a tiny
fraction of numbers can actually be hit. I also strongly suspect that the
floating point scaling is inherently non-uniform even for smaller ranges.

Perhaps we could produce an E_NOTICE if you give a range that's too large?

Functions like array_rand() or shuffle() use rand() and not mt_rand(),
so if you're on Windows and your array is larger than some 30k elements the
output will likely be severely biased.

If we fix this, we should do it at the same time as we fix mt_rand()'s
typo, since both could potentially break code (realistically just unit
tests) relying on deterministic output.

Even though changing our PRNG implementations will break seed sequences, I
think the time has come to clean up this mess for 7.1. (We might also want
to consider to alias rand and mt_rand to an entirely new algorithm, not
MT19937. Nowadays PRNGs are available that have both better statistical
properties and are faster than MT.)

If we did that, we could change it to always use a 64-bit value
internally (including on 32-bit systems through emulation). That way
some of our scaling woes would disappear.

On a different note, I don't think that philosophical discussions on the
topic of how much we ought to be deprecating will be very productive --
this is one of those topics people tend to be very stubborn about ;) Some
people value stability above everything else, and for others the number one
evil in PHP is our reluctance to get rid of old ---crap--- cruft. It would
be nice if we could let voting decide that question, and keep this thread
focused on specific issues and suggestion. I.e. on one hand suggestions for
things that we may want to deprecate, together with reasoning for why we
should do it.

I do think we should at least have a good case made for deprecating each
item. If something is merely a redundant alias or not very useful, then
there's not much case for getting rid of it, because there's little
benefit and the large disadvantage of breaking existing code. On the
other hand, if it's harmful in some way, then there's a greater case for
deprecation.

Thanks!

--
Andrea Faulds
https://ajf.me/

10 years ago by Rowan Collins — view source — reply

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I'm not sure about create_function() - while it is old, I don't see why
we should break working code using it just because better option is
available.

There's that, and there's the fact closures don't give you the same
functionality - as Andrea pointed out. I think
deprecating it and forcing people to rewrite their code differently
(either with eval or with closures) doesn't make
a whole lot of sense when create_function() works perfectly well. In
terms of security risks, if you use it like you
use closures I don't think it's any riskier. If you need eval() for
programmatically creating functions - it would obviously
be at the exact same risk levels. So we're left with marginal
performance gains - as practically speaking you don't
typically create thousands of functions dynamically in a given
request. If you do, chances are you've already
migrated to closures.

Funnily enough, one of my first contributions to this list was to
propose deprecating create_function:
http://marc.info/?l=php-internals&m=138178645724006&w=2

The answers to my proposal were mixed, as they have been here: some
agreed that it was ugly and a potential security problem if misused;
some pointed out use cases which can't trivially be implemented with
Closures, such as this:
https://github.com/phpcr/phpcr-utils/blob/42db960a6c58dcc3a71c2e4770050cda36f17c5b/src/PHPCR/Util/Console/Command/NodesUpdateCommand.php#L68

In the end I dropped the idea on the grounds that a deprecation notice
should have a clear migration path for all reasonable use cases, not
just some of them.

I tend to agree with Stas that deprecations need to be justified more
strongly than a general desire for tidiness. As with "can we rename
functions / fix argument order / etc", I wonder if there's scope for
publishing an FAQ which, while not holding the force of Official Policy,
is nonetheless endorsed as consensus to guide new contributions...

Regards,

Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]

10 years ago by Stephen Coakley — view source — reply

unread

With rand functions, I don't think we need to touch them. For some
applications, low-key randomness is just fine - if you need to shuffle
array of 20 elements or randomize unit test to ensure you're not testing
same value all the time, low-quality randomness is completely fine. For
other applications, there are superior solutions and everybody who needs
them already uses them, but again I see no value in removing those
functions. It would only cause more breakage and make adoption of new
versions (already horrible) even slower.

I think the obvious option here is to make rand() and srand() aliases to rand_mt() and srand_mt(), unless I'm missing something very basic, unless I'm missing something very basic here..? I see zero reason to deprecate them and break so much code when we can simply 'upgrade' them at zero cost to both us and users.

Aliasing to mt_rand() definitely makes sense. With a name like rand(),
everyone will use it just because it is an obvious and common name for
the normal way to generate random numbers. Aliasing essentially will
make rand() as everyone uses it, better.

--
Stephen

[RFC] Deprecations for PHP 7.1

-- Lester Caine - G8HFL

Regards,

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL