Re: Allowing NULL for some internal functions

On 2 Mar 2022, at 14:39, Andreas Leathley <a.leathley@gmx.net> wrote: > Type coercion already often does not work - giving the string "s" to an > integer-typed argument will lead to a TypeError, it will not be coerced. > I would prefer less coercions rather than more. Hi Andreas, I'll note that converting from NULL is used all the time, and is well defined: > https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php > <https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php> > "null is always converted to an empty string." > > https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.integer.php > <https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.integer.php> > "null is always converted to zero (0)." > > https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.float.php > <https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.float.php> > "For values of other types, the conversion is performed by converting the value to int > first and then to float" > > https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.boolean.php > <https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.boolean.php> > "When converting to bool, the following values are considered false [...] the special type > NULL" > [...] but having to coerce null seems always avoidable to me, and null > is a special value explicitely. In my data null and an empty string > sometimes are two possible values, and automatic conversion seems like a > value judgement by the language that they are kind of similar, which > they should not be. It really depends on your code base... Laravel, Symfony, CakePHP, CodeIgniter (the frameworks I'm familiar with) all return NULL for missing GET/POST/COOKIE values, and that is a useful feature... but when the developer naively passes that to any one of those listed parameters, you will get a deprecation message in 8.1, and a Type Error in the future... and finding all of these is incredibly hard. For consistency, the next step should be to deprecate or Type Error when doing this setcookie('id', 123) Craig