On 09/04/2019 08:32, Guilliam Xavier wrote:
I do kind of like the idea in the RFC, but I think it needs a better
argument for it.
For your other points, I find that Claude Pache has given pretty good
arguments in the meantime (thanks!) =) (By the way, I also thought
about say, "nullable_intval()", "nullable_strval()" etc. but we're
missing "arrayval()" and "objectval()"...)
The debate as always is between those for who 'NULL' is a key STATE that
is part of the interaction between a database and program and those who
do not have that need. In my world a variable has a number of states and
NULL is simply one of them. Thinking of NULL as 'uninitialized' is a
reasonable match, and when pushing a variable to a database it's NULL
state can be used to trigger loading a default value or to leave the
field unset for later handling. HAVING to put a value or a string into
the variable because 'it must have a type' is simply wrong. But the need
now to HAVE to cast at times is equally wrong? I'm still hitting errors
in stuff being moved to 7.2 where the 'fix' is adding a cast, to keep
PHP happy, but then the value may well be a NULL return from the data
set so one almost ends up needing two versions of a variable ... one to
keep the now stricter typing happy and one to store the actual data
returned from the database. This also links up with the leading and
trailing spaces discussion. That the working value is a left justified
or right justified number but the logic now requires an 'int' to keep it
quiet is pushing towards needing these separate versions of essentially
the same variable :( Making the associative array view of the data
difficult to manage ...
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