On 12/14/2014 12:51 AM, Levi Morrison wrote:
> While I think long-term this would be a beneficial change I think in
> the short term it's quite a hurdle.
This discussion will be identical whether we wait till PHP7 or PHP9 in a
decade. The longer this change takes to make, the more code that will be
mis-written to rely on the current behavior. If any long-term benefit is
to be reaped, now is the best time to do it - every future major version
will have a harder justification to make.
> There is definitely code out there relying on this behavior and
> changing it will result in the worst BC case: it will not fail in any
> way but will instead act differently.
There are also definitely IE5.5 users out there and websites that rely
on IE5.5-only features, but the actual numbers matter. There's no doubt
that somebody, somewhere is going to have broken code because they wrote
it without reading the docs that recommend against it or without
understanding how it works, or upgraded without reading a migration
guide or realizing that major version upgrades do make breaking changes
(more often than not). These people do exist and they may curse PHP
rather than themselves and leave it forever; the desire of the core team
to retain the maximum amount of these users is puzzling. The change
under discussion will not be causing any sort of mass-exodus from PHP,
the ecosystem will not collapse and it will not be the heat-death of the
universe. It will be removing a long-discouraged behavior and bring
expected uniformity to a common construct that has differed for no good
reason from other languages.
There's plenty of room for a #5 on the already non-0 list:
https://wiki.php.net/phpng#incompatibilities_made_on_purpose_and_are_not_going_to_be_fixed
In my opinion, chaining or nesting ternaries at all
should be discouraged; changing the associativity doesn't change the
fact that they are more difficult to follow and more error prone than
using different constructs.
I would disagree on this point. Just like there are cases where a large
switch/case results in more readable if-elseif chains, long conditional
assignment chains can serve the same purpose, granted you space them
appropriately. I would even go as far as saying that with proper
spacing, they are more readable than the 'if' or 'case' blocks that
would need to replace them.
--
Leon Sorokin
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