Re: NULL Coercion Consistency

On 27 May 2022, at 07:44, Jordan LeDoux <jordan.ledoux@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, May 26, 2022 at 5:21 AM Craig Francis <craig@craigfrancis.co.uk> wrote: >> It sounds like you got lucky - you have a function that has a problem with NULL (but I >> assume it's fine with an empty string?), and during your testing you happened to pass NULL to >> this function. As noted before, static analysis is *considerably* better at these types of checks, >> because it's able check if variables *can* contain NULL. They can also perform other checks as >> well (important when your code seems to care about NULL vs an empty string). > > > Nearly *all* code has a problem with null. Erm, but it doesn't... does it? I know I keep going on about this very simply example, but it represents a fairly typical style of programming PHP, and I just do not understand what the problem with it is: ``` $search = $request->input('q'); // Laravel, returns NULL when 'q' is not defined. echo 'Results for ' . htmlspecialchars($search); ``` But forget about it, hopefully someone else can find a solution to the problem. On 27 May 2022, at 07:44, Jordan LeDoux <jordan.ledoux@gmail.com> wrote: > It very much feels like the original effort to deprecate null calls decided to resolve this by > saying "let's have the language help developers improve their code so it doesn't have > these problems in the first place", and this effort is trying to resolve this by saying > "let's have the language support the buggy code in ways that makes it work". > > At my job, my task for the last three weeks has literally been upgrading our internal codebase > for 8.1, and the biggest set of logs I'm dealing with is exactly what you're talking about > here: null's passed to internal functions. Every single case I've looked at so far has > been traced to code that was written incorrectly, where some code somewhere was not properly > guarding its values, and error cases were slipping through. For one of the teams I work with (the only one trying to make the relevant changes), this is also their "biggest" problem... but they are having exactly the opposite experience, a considerable amount of hours have gone into finding and changing their code, and not a single change was for code that was "written incorrectly" (I suppose that depends on what you think "correct" code is)... the other teams I work with are either suppressing this notice, or simply not upgrading to 8.1. Craig