Re: [RFC] Exceptions in the engine

On 24 October 2013 10:41, Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com> wrote: > I'd like to propose an RFC, which allows the use of exceptions within the > engine and also allows changing existing fatal errors to exceptions: > > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/engine_exceptions > > This topic has been cropping up in the discussions for several of the > recent RFCs and I think the time has come to consider moving away from > fatal errors. > > Thoughts? I love the idea — unified error and exception handling would be a huge win both for simplifying code bases and teaching new developers — but I don't see any possible way we could do this in a 5.x release. The BC issues are just too great, and too many people rely heavily on the set_error_handler() behaviour that we have today. A couple of specific points that jumped at out me on my first skim: 1. I know Python has BaseException, but it feels a little like the exception version of functions with the name "real" in them. :) If this was $next_major material, then we could probably look at keeping Exception as the top level and inserting a UserException under it that userland exceptions derive from. (Or just not do it at all.) 2. Again, if this is $next_major material, I wouldn't selectively convert errors to exceptions as the "policy changes" section suggests — let's do them all and be done with it, and the only things that would still be errors are genuinely uncatchable things that already can't be handled by set_error_handler(). There's probably a broader discussion here around whether we should be starting to think about a new major release and what that would look like, but that's definitely not for this thread! Adam