return false if error

Heya, We were discussing the scenario where a function returns false in an error case in a thread on the general mailing list. I always thought the documentation would use mixed as return type in such a situation (like in strpos) but others disagreed. For instance, Mike Ford told me: > It has always been policy in the documentation to specify only the substantive return type(s) > of a function > in the signature, and only mention return of "false" as an error indicator in the > description. There are > many, many examples of this in the manual, and I think it's unlikely the policy will > change any time soon. So my question is, what is your opinion on that topic? I already committed two patches to change the return type to mixed, since the functions also return false. I could revert them (or discard the commit, I do not know if this is possible - was made through edit.php.net). IMO the most important thing is that the documentation is consistent. Either change all such functions to mixed or change strpos to int (and probably further functions as well). Or we go a new path and add a construct which indicates that a function returns false as well. For instance: int! strpos ( string $haystack , mixed $needle [, int $offset = 0 ] ) where int! stands for int or false if an error occurs. Cheers, Robert