Re: Assertions

On Thu, 2013-10-17 at 08:25 +0100, Joe Watkins wrote: > Morning All, > > I'd like to draw some attention to how poor assertions are in PHP. > > The current assertion API is not usable in my opinion; it has a > considerable overhead, relies on eval(), and is generally poorly > implemented. I don't have a strong opinion on this, but mind that by being based on eval the assert expression can use features from a different version of PHP. Something like if (PHP_VERSION_ID >= 50300) { assert('foo\\bar::baz == 42'); } the new form if (PHP_VERSION_ID >= 50300) { assert foo\\bar::baz == 42; } would give a parse error on older versions. (Yes, I'm using 5.3 and <5.3 as example where the new form would fail anyways, feel free to use PHP_VERSION_ID >= 51200 and PHP 5.26.0 features) > > This means that assert("some code here") will pass assertion > causing no error, because strings are no longer treated as code, > because eval is evil(); > I think this is bad for migration of code. For one it is impossible to have a code base with asserts working in both versions. For two it silently leads to completely different behavior. Changing this needs some clever strategy allowing migration. johannes