On 13.04.22 15:36, Craig Francis wrote:
On Mon, 11 Apr 2022 at 20:08, Andreas Leathley <a.leath...@gmx.net> wrote:You are taking parts of the documentation out of context, and omitting the start of the whole "Converting to string" section: "A value can be converted to a string using the (string) cast or the strval() function. String conversion is automatically done in the scope of an expression where a string is needed. This happens when using the echo or print functions, or when a variable is compared to a string. The sections on Types and Type Juggling will make the following clearer." I'm sorry, I've read this several times now, and I'm not sure what this adds. My RFC simply quotes the paragraphs that explain how null is coerced (other than the small abbreviation for booleans, those paragraphs are included in their entirety), I don't think it needs any more context than that, it's not like I'm mis-representing how coercion works (and is used) in PHP.
Mentioning the documentation as a reason to be "consistent" (which comes up again and again in your arguments with this RFC) just seems like a bogus reason to me. It is nitpicking about specific sentences in the documentation without refering to the surrounding context. It would be nicer to argue according to real technical arguments instead of arguments about sentences taken out of context in the documentation.
You can see NULL however you like, but most developers do not share that view. NULL has been passed to these functions, since, well, forever; and changing code to manually convert NULL to the relevant type is incredibly time consuming, and of questionable value (e.g. when developers simply add strval() everywhere).
"Most developers do not share that view". I find statements such as these as a tall order - did you interview the majority of developers around the world? Are you suggesting you are talking as a representative of a large population of PHP developers? How do you think you got such a role? I would prefer some humility and not assume you are an elected leader of an underrepresented group of developers and even knowing the intention behind their code. "NULL has been passed to these functions, since, well, forever" - this also goes for wrong values being passed to functions since forever leading to security issues and bugs. That is the whole point of developing a language: Reducing the surface for bugs, improving parts of it where a lot of bugs have happened historically and not making the same mistakes as other languages (and learning from the good parts of other languages). More people writing code in a certain way does not make that code better or safer.
