Re: Make var_dump() use serialize_precision

Nikita Popov wrote:

Hi internals, https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/5172 changes var_dump() to use serialize_precision instead of precision to dump floating-point numbers.

Hi Nikita, Thank you so much for doing this! I had wanted to do this for a long time, and I actually implemented it and began updating tests a while ago, but I never got round to finishing it. It looks in that PR like you also update debug_zval_dump(), maybe that should be mentioned? The one that gave me pause before and now is print_r(). In principle, it is just print but recursive (I assume that's whence the name comes), but unfortunately some people use it for debugging, so there might be a case for changing it. With that said, it's already a very bad choice for debugging due to other things ("1", 1, 1.0 and TRUE look the same, "0", 0.0, and 0 look the same, "", FALSE and NULL look the same…) that precision is the least of the developer's problems if they choose print_r(), and it's also not in the spirit of "print but recursive". So, it is probably unreasonable to change print_r() here. Maybe we should put a massive red "DO NOT USE THIS FOR DEBUGGING" warning on its documentation page… One more thing, does var_export() use serialize_precision already? I think it does but haven't checked. Thanks! Andrea