Calling method on non-object recoverable? (was: type hinting throwing a fatal error)

Derick Rethans wrote: > I implemented that (except I dropped the _ERROR part for > E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR as I found it too long). The patch is here: > > http://files.derickrethans.nl/patches/e_fatal-20050825.diff.txt > > Any comments? Since this new error level is being created, I have a suggestion for another type of error I would very much like to see changed from fatal to "recoverable". The error I'm referring to is attempting to call a method on a non-object. This used to be a E_WARNING a long time ago in PHP 4 (if memory serves), and is now fatal. I'm sure that many of you believe this SHOULD be a fatal error, but I find that this does tend to come up when dealing with methods that return either an object OR null/false. Take the following example when dealing with data access objects. Suppose that $user is an instance of User and has a method getLocation() that will either return an instance of Location or null if the user is not assigned to any location: print $user->getLocation()->getPhoneNumber(); If getLocation() returns null then the above is a fatal error. I realize that this is a mistake, and that the return value from getLocation() should be checked before calling getPhoneNumber() on it, but I've found this has been a typical error in my and my coworkers code. I'm proposing that this become an E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR so that I can at least catch it with my custom error handler and shutdown the script gracefully. Any thoughts?