Re: Disable autovivification on false

On Tue, May 25, 2021 at 11:23 AM Kamil Tekiela <tekiela246@gmail.com> wrote: > I'd like to start a discussion on the following RFC > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/autovivification_false > Particularly, I am looking for opinions on whether this behaviour should be > left alone, should be disabled on false, or should be disabled on null and > false, and left only for undefined variables. > > Autovivification is very useful in PHP, especially with multidimensional > arrays and loops. However, the question is should we allow it on false and > null values going forward. > > I agree it's useful, and should 100% not be killed on undef. There is doubtless a mountain of code in WordPress plugins alone which relies on this, not to mention other frameworks and libraries. As for false and null, I think it's reasonable to kill these (with a deprecation period) in a major version (e.g. 9.0). It might also be reasonable to only kill this behavior when strict_types is enabled. Essentially it would enforce making the array type accessors strict about operating on arrays. Would still need a deprecation period to go with that, but it would be less-rough on migrations of legacy codebases. -Sara