ID: 33495
Updated by: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Reported By: jsheets at idahoimageworks dot com
-Status: Open
+Status: Bogus
Bug Type: Scripting Engine problem
Operating System: FreeBSD
PHP Version: 5CVS-2005-06-27 (dev)
New Comment:
This is not a bug, also, if you have anything else to add - only a
patch which solves this problem is going to be considered.
Previous Comments:
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[2005-07-18 20:58:41] jsheets at idahoimageworks dot com
Opened again
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[2005-07-18 20:58:25] jsheets at idahoimageworks dot com
I have no problem if you want to make a note in the manual that
indicates in the past the function could be used in this form however
this form is now deprecated and support for it will be removed in the
future.
However that has not been done, there was no note made about the change
to the function and the change was done in between beta releases of PHP
5.1 (between 1 and 2).
GCC supports allows uses of functionality in unintended forms even
though it isn't pretty because it was initially created in that form.
They mark it as deprecated for at least a minor release (usually a
major x.x release or even just x release for example from 3 to 4 in the
case of major changes) and then remove it once the community has had an
appropiate amount of time to update their code or choose to stay with
an older version.
In the past PHP has followed this type of reasonsing, in attempting to
avoid breaking current behavior until a major release because people
there is most likely porting that will need to take place at that time
anyway.
However introducing fatal errors without a warning with something that
has worked for 5 years is simply bad and bogus.
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[2005-07-18 20:54:27] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Without this fix, you get memory corruptions which cause strange and
very hard to reproduce problems in large "enterprise" applications, or
actually, even in small ones. It's either this fatal error (and it
*should* be fatal, as you're doing *something wrong*), or hard to
debug, incomprehensible vague errors in your enterprise scripts. I know
what to choose.
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[2005-07-18 20:44:58] jsheets at idahoimageworks dot com
The problem being that because the behavior was not consistent with the
documentation since before PHP 4.1 means that this is a defect in
documentation if nothing else.
This has already broken several popular open source PHP applications on
my test bed sever and is sure to have a wide impact since it causes a
fatal error.
Once a behavior is introduced, even if it is technically wrong it
shouldn't be suddenly changed without warning especially when such
change introduces fatal errors.
This is a fairly big change in the way that this function works,
whether it was documented in that way or not (again seems like a
documentation problem not an implementation problem).
The fact that it behaved in the previous way for at least 5 years would
indicate it deserves more consideration before it is allowed into the
wild where it will break applications and annoy both users and
developers.
Professional web development companies such as my own will not like
having to go back and "fix" countless websites built on popular
platforms because behavior was "fixed" in such a way that it makes a
function less usable than it originally was before the fix.
It seems that the time to make such a change would be a major release
of PHP such as PHP 6, not PHP 5.1 especially since a good number of PHP
4 users have not yet moved to PHP 5 and may consider PHP 5.1 the first
stable release.
You have to consider backwards compatability and breaking compatability
that has been there since PHP 4.0.x is a fairly big deal where changing
the documentation a little wouldn't be.
The question isn't where is it documented that way the question is why
shouldn't you be able to do it?
It makes since to be able to take the return value from a function call
and use it in another function call all languages including PHP allow
you to do so in cases where the return value is useful.
Removing this ability not only breaks compatability with both PHP
4.0.x, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and 5.0.x but it also makes PHP itself hardware to
use in this case and results in bulkier code without need.
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[2005-06-28 09:10:37] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
It's actually a bug fix that "breaks" this. Where in the manual does it
say that you can pass something else than variables by reference?
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The remainder of the comments for this report are too long. To view
the rest of the comments, please view the bug report online at
http://bugs.php.net/33495
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Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/?id=33495&edit=1
