Re: [RFC] Reclassifying engine warnings

On 12/09/2019 15:43, Robert Korulczyk wrote:

One additional line will make your code much more obvious and easier to read and understand: $i ??= 0; $i++;

I don't find this code at all obvious: foreach ( $something as $foo ) {

    $i ??= 0;
    $i++;

} I mean, huh? What's that zero doing there, is it resetting the variable every loop? Now, in that simple case, you can and probably should initialise the counter before the loop: $i=0; foreach ( $something as $foo ) {

    $i++;

} But that's not the example I gave earlier! The example I gave earlier was a multi-dimensional array: $foo = []; foreach ( $something as $key1 ) {

    foreach ( $somethingElse as $key2 ) {
          $foo[$key1][$key2]++;
    }

} Even using ??= the initialise-everything-before-use version looks like this: $foo = []; foreach ( $something as $key1 ) {

    foreach ( $somethingElse as $key2 ) {
          $foo[$key1] ??= [];
          $foo[$key1][$key2] ??= 0;
          $foo[$key1][$key2]++;
    }

} Again, the values are confusing: the end result will never contain an empty array at the first level, and will never contain a 0 at the second level. Those two lines aren't aiding the readability of that algorithm in any way; I have to read past them to find the actual business of the loop, which is counting something, using the ++ operator. What's more, they're not preventing any bugs either! If I accidentally reuse $foo from a previous loop, the extra lines won't reinitialise anything for me; if I initialise it to empty, the two loops are functionally identical. So that's where I came up with two suggestions to actually add to the language, rather than just taking away: - a more granular way to express that this code is not actually error-prone, combining the 3 lines back into one - or, a way to express the intent of the code more clearly, such as declaring the shape of an array Regards, -- Rowan Tommins (né Collins) [IMSoP]