Re: type hinting throwing a fatal error

From:	Zeev Suraski	Date:	Wed, 24 Aug 2005 08:08:06 +0000
Subject:	Re: type hinting throwing a fatal error
References:	1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17	Groups:	php.internals
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At 09:26 24/08/2005, Derick Rethans wrote:

On Tue, 23 Aug 2005, Andi Gutmans wrote: I didn't quite understand. Users would be able to handle E_FATAL errors? How would exceptions from those user handlers propagate the C extensions? No, they would only be able to catch E_ERROR, E_FATAL is the current "E_ERROR" and can NOT be caught by the user defined error handler. New status (or atleast, IMO): E_NOTICE: Just for little notices to inform the user that something
           might have gone wrong.
E_WARNING: Something went wrong, probably resulting in unwanted
           behavior.

No change here (good!)

E_ERROR: An error situation occurred, which is probably dangerous for
           a script to continue, but does not leave the Engine itself in
           an unstable state. If this one is not caught in a user
           defined error handler, the application aborts.
E_FATAL: The engine is in an unstable state, we have to abort. Not
           catchable by a user defined error handler.

Replacing the meaning of E_ERROR is elegant, but it does create a problem of cross-version compatibility of extensions (at the source code level). If you want to raise an error that terminates execution, you'll have to do it in two different ways - that's quite annoying. While I think there are a lot of situations where E_ERROR is an overkill, there are tons of situations where it isn't, so this is an issue. Given that, I think we should go with the introduction of a new error level, E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR, and keep E_ERROR with its existing meaning. Zeev