PHP 4.0 Bug #4053: define() always returns TRUE if attempting to redefine a constant

From: reaster@comptechnews.com Operating system: Linux glibc PHP version: 4.0 Beta 4 Patch Level 1 PHP Bug Type: Misbehaving function Bug description: define() always returns TRUE if attempting to redefine a constant I discovered minor problems with the define() function. Please consider the following ... When I run: echo "\nReturned: " . define("CONSTANT", 1); echo "\nValue: " . CONSTANT; echo "\nReturned: " . define("CONSTANT", 2); echo "\nValue: " . CONSTANT; I get: Returned: 1 Value: 1 Returned: 1 Value: 1 According to the documentation, a constant cannot be redefined. define() doesn't violate that rule, but the return value misleads you to think that the second define() call was a success and that the value should be 2. I wanted to emulate c-style #ifndef #endif conditional inclusion in my phps include files as follows: if(define("FILE_PHPS",1) ) { // contents of include file, functions etc. } When I try this, define() returns true everytime. I thought maybe it should return FALSE if FILE_PHPS is already defined and not include the contents. If I try doing it this way: if(!defined("CONSTANT")) { define("CONSTANT", 1); // rest of contents of include file ,functions etc } then everything is fine. This looks more like how C does it. However, it now takes two function calls instead of just one. A php script would use my phps include file with a simple include: include("file.phps"); Multiple occurrances of include("file.phps"); would not cause any problem. A final suggestion for define() is that it default to a value of 1 so that you can just define a constant as follows: define("CONSTANT"); this would make CONSTANT equal to 1 and case sensitive. If there is some better way to conditionally include files like the C preprocessor does for C, please drop me an email. Thanks.