On Tuesday, 2 July 2024 at 07:49, Marc Bennewitz <marc@mabe.berlin> wrote:
> Hi Gina, > > On 25.06.24 16:36, Gina P. Banyard wrote: > >> Hello internals, >> >> It is this time of year again where we proposed a list of deprecations to >> add in PHP 8.4: >> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecations_php_8_4 >> As a reminder, this list has been compiled over the course of the past year >> by various different people. >> >> And as usual, each deprecation will be voted in isolation. >> >> We still have a bit of time buffer, so if anyone else has any suggestions, >> they are free to add them to the RFC. >> >> Some should be non-controversial, others a bit more. >> If such, they might warrant their own dedicated RFC, or be dropped from the >> proposal altogether. > > I would like to propose a deprecation of implicit cast to int of numeric > strings using bit shift operators. > > For the following reasons: > 1. In PHP strings are byte arrays and without context it's not possible to > know if "123" is actually a number or just three bytes of 0x313234 > 2. The other bitwise operators `|`, `&`, `~`, `^` already take it as byte > array, only the bit shift operators try to be smart here > 3. Non numeric strings already fail with "Unsupported operand types: string > >> int" > 4. This makes working with byte arrays unnecessary hard and forces you to use > limited and system depending int's. > > https://3v4l.org/IBUDD > > While processing strings as byte arrays using bit shift operators needs a > separate RFC, I think, if there is an agreement on deprecating this implicit > cast it would already be beneficial to have this sooner than later. > > What do you think? I personally think the scope of this is too large as you have not accounted of all the details. If you try to do a bitwise operator between a numeric string and an integer the numeric string will be implicitly converted to an int. However, if you try to use a bitwise operator between an integer and a non-numeric string you also get a TypeError about unsupported operand types: https://3v4l.org/W582TN Thus the current bit shift operators follow from the existing semantics, and curtailling them without doing it for the other bitwise operators doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Moreover, I feel it makes more sense creating dedicated functions for byte array/string bitwise operators and deprecate using the native operators for this and relegate them just for integers. Best regards, Gina P. Banyard
