Re: Array dereference on scalar / null values

Hi internals, I've done some bug report gathering on essentially the following behaviour: $a = 123; var_dump($a[1]); // "NULL" $b = true; var_dump($b[1]); // "NULL" $f = fopen('file', 'r'); var_dump($f[1]); // "NULL" $n = null; var_dump($n[1]); // "NULL" Bug reports: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=37676 https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=40692 https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=62769 https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=64194 https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=65484 From the comments it seems that there's some disagreement within the group, for example: Nikita: "I would tentatively classify this as a bug." Tony: "Reclassified as feature request.." Xinchen: "there was a similar bug report of this behavior, and I seems made a fix for it." Ilia: "this is not a bug." x 2 Joe: "it is the only reasonable thing _to expect_" From my understanding, developers are expecting to see notices when this happens, something like "Cannot use integer/boolean/resource/null as array in %s on line %d"; I think they're okay with the fact that the end result will still be "NULL", though. The list() operator has since complicated matters; if we would indeed introduce notices as requested, the following code would cause issues: $array = [1, 2, 3]; while (list($key, $value) = each($array)) { echo "$key = $value\n"; } The return value of each() - as it has reached the end of an array - is false, so the above code would show two notices. Unfortunately, we must assume that all code in the manual are actually used and so it would surely break stuff when introduced. We could mitigate this issue by having each() return null instead and introduce notices for all other scalars, but this code is not unlikely: while (($data = each($array)) !== false) { echo "${data[0]} = ${data[1]}\n"; } So my question is, how should we handle this? Close all bug reports and add something to the documentation? Allow array dereference only on booleans *and* null? Best, Jack