Hey PHP Internals, So there hasn't been much discussion on this RFC, and yet a lot of people have voted -1 on it. This is a little disappointing because I'm not entirely sure why people are against it - and no one seems to want to debate it either.
>From pre-RFC discussions, two main concerns were raised: 1. This will promote the creation of poor code. 2. The proposed semantics of empty() is wrong. It should be equivalent to logically AND'ing empty()'s arguments together - just like with isset(). To readdress these two points: 1. Any feature that reduces the amount of written code can be said to make it easier to write code - regardless of whether this is good or bad code. That part is up to the developer. Perhaps the examples in my RFC do not portray this feature in the best of lights - they were simply meant to show the more extreme usages of empty() in popular, real-world codebases. So let me provide some statistics. I ran the following egrep on a number of CMSs (the regular expression used isn't perfect, but it still gives some sort of approximation): egrep -rio '(empty\(.*\) *(\|\| *empty\(.*\))+)|(!empty\(.*\) *(&& *!empty\(.*\))+)' project_dir/ | wc -l Results: WordPress: 50 OpenCart: 22 phpbb: 36 Drupal: 74 SMF2.1: 266 Joomla: 23 So the proposed short-hand notation of empty() in this RFC does have its usages. Just as a full disclaimer though, framework codebases will not see this same usefulness since they don't handle business-specific validation logic on input fields, web service data, etc (which seems like the predominant usage of multiple empty()'s in a single condition). 2. The falsy semantics of empty() means that inlining its behaviour to exactly match isset() isn't logical. For example, we can roughly assert that `empty() = ! isset()`. This holds true with the current semantics proposed by this RFC: $defined = 1; // $undefined; var_dump(empty($defined, $undefined) === ! isset($defined, $undefined)); // bool(true) If empty()'s arguments were logically AND'ed together, then the above assertion would not hold true. So those are the two arguments I'm aware of - if anyone in the -1 camp has any other reasons, then please do raise them! Thanks, Tom > Hello PHP Internals! > > I'd like to put the variadic empty() RFC to vote. > > RFC: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/variadic_empty > > Voting will finish in 14 days time on March 21st. > > Thanks, > Tom -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
