> Le 26 juin 2019 à 11:36, Benjamin Morel <benjamin.mo...@gmail.com> a écrit :
>
>> (...) could be the case depending on a declaration somewhere else in the
> source code.
>> That's the confusion Claude and I were talking about: You cannot be sure
> what a very simple line of code does.
>
> Oh, I see. You mean that only replacing some of the current results with
> TypeErrors would be acceptable; returning a different value would not.
> This makes a lot of sense, but once again prevents the language from slowly
> moving towards something different (and better), leaving it stuck in its
> legacy forever.
>
> I'm starting to believe that a joint effort to fork PHP if the only way out
> :(
>
> Ben
It would be something “different”, but not necessarily “better”.
Programmers may intentionally rely on the current semantics when comparing
numeric strings, e.g. in the following cases:
* values that are grabbed from a database using a driver that returns only
strings (or nulls);
* values that are read from $_POST and that ultimately stems from some HTML
<input type="number"> element.
-------
It was certainly a fundamental design error to have both implicit type
conversion and operators that did different things based on the type of their
operands. That leads to the infamous `"1" + 1 == 11` problem in JavaScript, or
the the "3" < "24" problem in PHP. That could have been avoided in two ways:
* either by forbidding implicit conversion;
* or by using different operators for different types (as does Perl).
Now, returning to the case of the comparison operators like `<` or `==`.
Instead of killing implicit conversion and redefining the meaning of those
operators in cases that are *not* just edge case, it may be preferable to use
the other approach:
* in some strict mode, reserve `<`, `==` etc. for numeric comparison, and throw
a TypeError one of the operand is not numeric;
* If we deem it worth, define a new operators for string comparison. (Although
I’m not really sure it is worth: we have `strcmp()` and `===` for byte-to-byte
comparison, and the Collator class for alphabetical sorting that actually works
in languages not restricted to unaccented latin characters.)
—Claude
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