Re: Fix ReflectionType::__toString() BC break

On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 10:13 AM, Nicolas Grekas <nicolas.grekas@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > See https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/2136 > >> > > > > I don't like this. > > > > I understand, really. I do have to deal with BC on Symfony side also and > it's a really hard constraint. Yet, we stick to it as much as possible, in > order to not add pain to others. > Sometime, we have to be pragmatic and accept solutions that are not "pure", > for the shake of our BC promise. > > PHP internals has such a BC policy, it should really stick to it. It's not > always fun, for sure, but the pain for others it strong. It's not only > me&Ocramius, nor Symfony&Zend: everybody not following internals to adapt > to latest BC breaks will be hit, potentially. This is bad for the > reputation of PHP. It makes the PHP platform unstable as far as confidence > is concerned. > > In this case, we should find a technical solution that preserves BC. Being > this patch or unconditionally returning the type name with nullable info is > fine, you'll decide what's best. > > But please don't consider BC as something that one can bypass when it gets > annoying. > > Thanks from me and from many others for considering :) > I'm not so sure its a BC though. Technically nullable types don't exist in 7.0 and as such would be impossible to return said question mark. Its only adding support for a new feature, not changing how an existing feature works IMO. If nullable types had been in 7.0 its highly probably, that __toString would have returned the leading question mark back then. > Nicolas >