Re: Old style constructors in PHP-8

On Wednesday, January 30, 2019 5:41:45 AM CST Nikita Popov wrote: > On Wed, Jan 30, 2019 at 12:11 PM Dmitry Stogov <dmitry@zend.com> wrote: > > Hi, > > > > > > I've just noticed that Wordpress-4.1 on PHP master started silently > > produce different output. > > > > The problem that PHP master started to ignore old-style constructors. > > > > They were deprecated in PHP-7 and PHP produced the following warning > > > > > > Deprecated: Methods with the same name as their class will not be > > constructors in a future version of PHP; ... has a deprecated constructor > > > > > > PHP master doesn't produce any warnings and just constructs a class > > without constructor. > > > > This silent behavior change may become a problem for porting legacy code > > to PHP-8, > > > > May be, it makes sense to emit fatal error in case of old-style > > constructor. > > > > > > Thanks. Dmitry. > > First of all, it is probably important to note that the RFC for this ( > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/remove_php4_constructors) explicitly > specifies > that in PHP 8 methods with the same name as the class are interpreted as > ordinary methods and no warning or error is thrown. I've CC'd Levi and > Andrea, who authored this RFC. > > I think as an end goal, what the RFC specifies is preferable for a number > of reasons: > > * You should be able to call your methods whatever you like. PHP only > reserves the __ prefix for itself. > * The behavior is consistent with classes inside namespaces, where methods > with the same name as the class are treated as normal methods for a long > time already. > * The fact that a method has the same name as the class may be completely > incidental if it comes from a trait (see > https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=77470). The trait does not > control in which > classes it may be used and which names those classes may have. Every Drupal 7 or 8 site includes classes that have a method name the same as the class name, on the assumption that it's safe to do for a normal method in current PHP versions. Making that suddenly a Fatal would be, er, bad. :-) As others have noted, this is easily solved with static analysis tools. There's been discussion of WP moving to a PHP 7-based version of PHP sometime this year (no promises, but that's the scuttlebutt), which would let them convert to __construct() universally and safely well before PHP 8 becomes an issue. --Larry Garfield

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