Re: Re: Release process

At 08:48 PM 5/3/2001 -0400, David Croft wrote:

In my humble opinion 'null' is a 'pseudovalue' that has been made available for some time. If it was never intended for a script to be able to use it, it should never have been exposed. But it has been and many people, myself included, are using it.

That's wrong. It was a new value introduced which was meant to be seen (it was asked for by Thies). But it was meant to be unset. To be quite honest, I don't even quite remember if Zend still uses it for internal values. I think it doesn't anymore. I was just saying that forget the Zend internals, there is a question of semantics one needs to think of. I must admit I haven't had the time to think of this yet in full and I'll think about it again. But although these things always seem trivial to many people you have to understand that sometimes the implications can be much more far reaching than what you think. Also no one has gone through all of the modules and check if we are consistent with when NULL is returned and when not (returned as an array element). It would also help to make a game plan of what to do but I think adding key_exists() without being sure of the whole picture is a mistake. We might end up with the conclusion that this function is the right thing, but it has to be a serious conclusion after checking all of the aspects. Andi

It is particularly useful to mark a value that has not yet been filled. The same way NULL is used in SQL. If you take out this behaviour there is no 'pseudo-value' to indicate the absence of value and we will go back to using 0 or constants, a hack at best. Also, I see a distinction semantically between isset and key_exists. Isset asks whether it is set to a tangible value. Key_exists asks whether the array contains an entry, any entry, for that key. My 2 cents, David -- |> /+\ \| | |> David Croft Infotrek On Thu, 3 May 2001, Zeev Suraski wrote: At 17:20 3/5/2001, Cynic wrote:

I very much agree with Andrei on this. Please, keep the existing functionality. Although, I'm not familiar with any issues possibly connected with this. Does it hurt anything?

Yes, it requires adding of functions that duplicate isset()'s behavior in a way that may change in the future (implementation dependent). Zeev -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-dev-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For additional commands, e-mail: php-dev-help@lists.php.net To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-dev-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For additional commands, e-mail: php-dev-help@lists.php.net To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net