Re: A bug, or not a bug...

On Fri, 28 Jul 2000 14:56:42 -0500, Richard Lynch wrote: [snip] >The point, though, is that there are a lot of under-documented "what-if" >sort of things throughout PHP. A lot of these are implicit from the >standpoint of PHP converting any string that doesn't even *look* like a >number into 0, but there are some that are not quite so obvious... Of >course I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I know I see >"complaints" about such things on php-general from people who are, say, Perl >hackers, which they claim has all this sort of stuff documented. (Not being >willing to hurt my brain with terse-style Perl code, I wouldn't know >personally...) But I do know that there are posts every once in a while >that start off with "Yes, it's really dumb to do this, but PHP really >shouldn't do XXX when I...." Or, "the documentation doesn't really say what >should happen if I..." I guess Perl has a couple of years start on documenting stuff in the language. It also has one person who acts as an authority on what goes into the language and how it should act, Larry Wall. Plus he's a linguist. PHP is much more a community project, although earlydays were based on Rasmus, and then the engine has sprung from the loins of Zeev and Andi. > >I think the first thing to be done might be to define the scale and scope of >the PHP-DOC-QA effort -- Do you really want to nail down every detail of >possible input and decide if the output is documented, a known error >message, or simply an undefined behaviour, or is there some better >meta-structure about how to define PHP's behaviour, or... Its not that i want to find every possible input, I just want to make a decision when someone else discovers that utterly weird input, that gives a strange output. It would be easier if someone (like Guy Steele) had written a handbook of what the language is, but we are writing the book as we go. I'll get a magicians dice and roll it... -- jalal --