On 14/12/2014 00:53, Leon Sorokin wrote:
Respectfully,
PHP's 'Unexpected behavior is not a bug' stance is pretty infuriating
[...]
Documentation of unexpected behavior does not make something 'not a bug'.
Whether or not this particular bug is fixable, I do agree with this:
"we're not going to fix this because it's hard / too late" is not the
same as "this is not a bug".
For instance, attempting to decrement a null value with the -- operator
results in null, even though incrementing with ++ will result in int(1),
and, even more bafflingly, using -= 1 will result in int(-1). This is
documented behaviour, but with no rationale other than "it's always been
that way". http://3v4l.org/bfsZ8 Apparently, this bug has been around
since (at least) PHP 3, but does that really mean we're never allowed to
fix it? At least the resolution to this report was "Won't Fix" rather
than "Not a Bug": https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=20548
Personally, I consider the non-evaluation of arguments to undeclared
constructors (see "Default constructors" RFC thread) to be another
example (an unfortunate consequence of a valid optimisation, resulting
in behaviour that nobody would have specified), although Stas disagrees.
As I mentioned in that other thread, one of the implications of saying
"it's not a bug" is to assert that it's part of the *language* to work a
particular way, and so should be specified and reproduced in other
implementations (from tests on 3v4l.org, HHVM carefully replicates the
null-- bug, but not the no-constructor lazy evaluation). Changing it
then implies changing the language specification, and other
implementations matching the appropriate version. If, on the other hand,
we accept certain things as *bugs in the implementation*, then other
implementations may diverge in behaviour anyway, and a new major version
released on php.net could (in a sort of philosophical way) be considered
a new implementation.
Now, the associativity of the ternary operator is presumably in the
language specification already, and belongs there, as it's such a basic
attribute of the operator. I'm also inclined to agree that the benefit
may not outweigh the cost of fixing it at this stage, but I do think
it's worth discussing.
--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]
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