Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Fix the Tenary Operator -- Please!? Please?
Hey: On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 1:10 PM, Kris Craig kris.cr...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 3:40 PM, Alain Williams a...@phcomp.co.uk wrote: On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 10:31:00PM +, Rowan Collins wrote: What I've always been annoyed by is the *precedence* of the operator - having to add brackets to mix it with string concatenation, etc - which it turns out to is the same in all sorts of languages. It is the ''all sorts of languages'' that is key here. The point is that PHP associativity for ?: is different from other languages and it is that that confuses and leads to bugs. What is right/wrong is not as important as all others doing it the other way. -- Alain Williams Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer. +44 (0) 787 668 0256 http://www.phcomp.co.uk/ Parliament Hill Computers Ltd. Registration Information: http://www.phcomp.co.uk/contact.php #include std_disclaimer.h -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php The feature freeze thing kinda rings hollow for me, as well, because we were debating this fairly recently before the feature freeze and we still got pushback from people who feared BC breakage. This is a bug (whether we're calling it one or not, it is a bug) and it needs to be fixed. PHP does handle it differently, yes, but the different way in which it's handling it is wrong. At least, that seems to be the prevailing opinion among devs. If we don't put this in 7.0 because of the feature freeze, it needs to go into the next minor version if the RFC passes. We should've pulled the trigger on this before the feature freeze and we shouldn't have to wait until 8.0 because of that. I don't think freeze should block bug fixes... thanks --Kris -- Xinchen Hui @Laruence http://www.laruence.com/ -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Fix the Tenary Operator -- Please!? Please?
On 26 March 2015 22:40:56 GMT, Alain Williams a...@phcomp.co.uk wrote: On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 10:31:00PM +, Rowan Collins wrote: What I've always been annoyed by is the *precedence* of the operator - having to add brackets to mix it with string concatenation, etc - which it turns out to is the same in all sorts of languages. It is the ''all sorts of languages'' that is key here. The point is that PHP associativity for ?: is different from other languages and it is that that confuses and leads to bugs. What is right/wrong is not as important as all others doing it the other way. This reply is competely out of context to the message you quote. Yes, I know that the *associativity* of the operator is wrong. My contention is that in practice, few people ever try to associate multiple instances of the operator, so few bugs result from it not working. I contrasted this with *precedence*, particularly the precedence of an expression mixing the ternary operator with string concatenation, which is a much more common thing to do. But here, PHP is doing the right thing, if measured by other languages doing the same. Personally, I'd be in favour of making the operator non-associative, thus breaking obviously if people try it. Changing it now would result in people using it in PHP 7, then running the code under PHP 5 and having obscure bugs to fix. Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP] -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Fix the Tenary Operator -- Please!? Please?
Michael Morris wrote on 27/03/2015 12:03: Rowan, I seriously, seriously doubt anyone would write PHP 7 compliant code that only takes advantage of ternary associativity, a feature that is only occasionally useful. If they can't take the hint from the parse errors arising out of the spaceship op and all the other stuff being added, they're too dumb to be programming and need to find another line of work. I disagree. It would be perfectly easy for someone used to another language to be developing in a PHP 7 environment, use the idiom that's familiar to them (chained ternary operators as a kind of if-else expression), and see the results they're expecting, all without knowing it will work completely differently run in a PHP 5 environment. The rest of the code might well run fine on PHP 5, since other than scalar type hints, there's really not that much that's changed. Do you really think every PHP library is suddenly going to find loads of uses for the spaceship operator that are so pressing they'll bump their minimum version requirement to 7.0? Breaking loudly when moving between versions is always going to be better than behaving differently in a very hard to debug way. While breaking backwards compatibility for its own sake is bad, avoiding it to keep a bug in the system is worse in my opinion. And again, this is a bug. If the way PHP associates could be used for something that would be different, but it can't. I honestly doubt any code even exists that takes advantage of the current behavior. Yes, that's why I suggest non-associativity - very little current code will break, anyone trying to use the unavailable idiom will get instant feedback that it's not supported rather than unexpected behaviour. And then later, when 8.0 rolls around, we can look at adding in the correct associativity, knowing for sure that no PHP 7 deployments will be affected. Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP] -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Fix the Tenary Operator -- Please!? Please?
On 26 March 2015 at 22:40, Michael Morris tendo...@gmail.com wrote: It's not a feature though - it's a bug. It's just one of those bugs that the fixing of which may break something. TL;DR -1 for 7, and -1 in general. It's not really a bug, it works according to the defined behaviour, the issue is that some (I think most) people disagree with the correctness of the defined behaviour. The rules are quite clear that this cannot go into 7 at this point, and no exceptions can be made to this rule otherwise there may as well not be a rule at all. On the more personal level of my own opinion, I don't believe there is enough benefit in fixing this to do it at all. It will likely break a lot of codebases and slow down the adoption of whichever version introduces the fix, and all it does is give people the ability to do something which some (and again I think most) people would agree is a horrible thing to do from a readability and maintainability perspective. It also suffers from a similar issue to the API cleanup idea that come up again and again - yes, some arguably poor decisions were made a long time ago which have left us with inconsistencies and that favourite phrase of proponents of these ideas, cognitive overhead. Fixing the inconsistencies only serves to *add* cognitive overhead. People may not like how it works, but at least they know how it works - and anyone writing run anywhere code would still do what they do now, which in my experience is generally write the ternary chain with brackets to disambiguate it, then realise it looks horrible and change it to an elseif tree. On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 6:31 PM, Rowan Collins rowan.coll...@gmail.com wrote: On 26 March 2015 20:54:12 GMT, Michael Morris tendo...@gmail.com wrote: Per PHPsadness... http://phpsadness.com/sad/30 Since 7 is allowed to have BC breaks this would be the time to fix this. I'll let someone with more seniority actually write this up - but please, please fix this - it's a very long standing annoyance. I used to think this was a major nuisance, but recently thought about it and decided I've never once wanted to do this - the result is really ugly code whatever the associativity. What I've always been annoyed by is the *precedence* of the operator - having to add brackets to mix it with string concatenation, etc - which it turns out to is the same in all sorts of languages. Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP] -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Fix the Tenary Operator -- Please!? Please?
Rowan, I seriously, seriously doubt anyone would write PHP 7 compliant code that only takes advantage of ternary associativity, a feature that is only occasionally useful. If they can't take the hint from the parse errors arising out of the spaceship op and all the other stuff being added, they're too dumb to be programming and need to find another line of work. While breaking backwards compatibility for its own sake is bad, avoiding it to keep a bug in the system is worse in my opinion. And again, this is a bug. If the way PHP associates could be used for something that would be different, but it can't. I honestly doubt any code even exists that takes advantage of the current behavior. On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 4:57 AM, Rowan Collins rowan.coll...@gmail.com wrote: On 26 March 2015 22:40:56 GMT, Alain Williams a...@phcomp.co.uk wrote: On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 10:31:00PM +, Rowan Collins wrote: What I've always been annoyed by is the *precedence* of the operator - having to add brackets to mix it with string concatenation, etc - which it turns out to is the same in all sorts of languages. It is the ''all sorts of languages'' that is key here. The point is that PHP associativity for ?: is different from other languages and it is that that confuses and leads to bugs. What is right/wrong is not as important as all others doing it the other way. This reply is competely out of context to the message you quote. Yes, I know that the *associativity* of the operator is wrong. My contention is that in practice, few people ever try to associate multiple instances of the operator, so few bugs result from it not working. I contrasted this with *precedence*, particularly the precedence of an expression mixing the ternary operator with string concatenation, which is a much more common thing to do. But here, PHP is doing the right thing, if measured by other languages doing the same. Personally, I'd be in favour of making the operator non-associative, thus breaking obviously if people try it. Changing it now would result in people using it in PHP 7, then running the code under PHP 5 and having obscure bugs to fix. Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP] -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Fix the Tenary Operator -- Please!? Please?
On Fri, 2015-03-27 at 08:03 -0400, Michael Morris wrote: While breaking backwards compatibility for its own sake is bad, avoiding it to keep a bug in the system is worse in my opinion. And again, this is a bug. If the way PHP associates could be used for something that would be different, but it can't. I honestly doubt any code even exists that takes advantage of the current behavior. What you are suggesting is not just breaking BC but Changing behavior of code in a hard to debug way as previously working code will suddenly start to do something else than expected probably without emitting any error. If you want this to run this requires a clear migration strategy for the billions of lines of code out there. Till this is provided please help focusing on things we can actually improve, like testing PHP 7 to make sure it will be a stable release. Thanks, johannes -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Fix the Tenary Operator -- Please!? Please?
De : Xinchen Hui [mailto:larue...@php.net] I don't think freeze should block bug fixes... Strictly speaking, not sure it can be considered as a bug. But, even if it is, what about bugfixes that cause BC breaks ? What is the rule ? Can we introduce BC breaks after feature freeze ? The question, IMO, is about the BC break, not whether this is a bug or not. Regards François -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Fix the Tenary Operator -- Please!? Please?
On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 3:40 PM, Alain Williams a...@phcomp.co.uk wrote: On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 10:31:00PM +, Rowan Collins wrote: What I've always been annoyed by is the *precedence* of the operator - having to add brackets to mix it with string concatenation, etc - which it turns out to is the same in all sorts of languages. It is the ''all sorts of languages'' that is key here. The point is that PHP associativity for ?: is different from other languages and it is that that confuses and leads to bugs. What is right/wrong is not as important as all others doing it the other way. -- Alain Williams Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer. +44 (0) 787 668 0256 http://www.phcomp.co.uk/ Parliament Hill Computers Ltd. Registration Information: http://www.phcomp.co.uk/contact.php #include std_disclaimer.h -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php The feature freeze thing kinda rings hollow for me, as well, because we were debating this fairly recently before the feature freeze and we still got pushback from people who feared BC breakage. This is a bug (whether we're calling it one or not, it is a bug) and it needs to be fixed. PHP does handle it differently, yes, but the different way in which it's handling it is wrong. At least, that seems to be the prevailing opinion among devs. If we don't put this in 7.0 because of the feature freeze, it needs to go into the next minor version if the RFC passes. We should've pulled the trigger on this before the feature freeze and we shouldn't have to wait until 8.0 because of that. --Kris
Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Fix the Tenary Operator -- Please!? Please?
Hi, Michael Morris tendo...@gmail.com writes: Per PHPsadness... http://phpsadness.com/sad/30 Since 7 is allowed to have BC breaks this would be the time to fix this. It's too late. Feature freeze is gone. I'll let someone with more seniority actually write this up - but please, please fix this - it's a very long standing annoyance. Cheers, -- Florian Margaine signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Fix the Tenary Operator -- Please!? Please?
The deadline for PHP 7 features has passed On 26 March 2015 at 20:54, Michael Morris tendo...@gmail.com wrote: Per PHPsadness... http://phpsadness.com/sad/30 Since 7 is allowed to have BC breaks this would be the time to fix this. I'll let someone with more seniority actually write this up - but please, please fix this - it's a very long standing annoyance.
Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Fix the Tenary Operator -- Please!? Please?
Hi! Since 7 is allowed to have BC breaks this would be the time to fix this. I'll let someone with more seniority actually write this up - but please, please fix this - it's a very long standing annoyance. The way to do this would be to submit an RFC and put it to vote. Unfortunately, it's too late for 7 since feature freeze date already passed. -- Stas Malyshev smalys...@gmail.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Fix the Tenary Operator -- Please!? Please?
On 26 March 2015 20:54:12 GMT, Michael Morris tendo...@gmail.com wrote: Per PHPsadness... http://phpsadness.com/sad/30 Since 7 is allowed to have BC breaks this would be the time to fix this. I'll let someone with more seniority actually write this up - but please, please fix this - it's a very long standing annoyance. I used to think this was a major nuisance, but recently thought about it and decided I've never once wanted to do this - the result is really ugly code whatever the associativity. What I've always been annoyed by is the *precedence* of the operator - having to add brackets to mix it with string concatenation, etc - which it turns out to is the same in all sorts of languages. Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP] -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Fix the Tenary Operator -- Please!? Please?
On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 10:31:00PM +, Rowan Collins wrote: What I've always been annoyed by is the *precedence* of the operator - having to add brackets to mix it with string concatenation, etc - which it turns out to is the same in all sorts of languages. It is the ''all sorts of languages'' that is key here. The point is that PHP associativity for ?: is different from other languages and it is that that confuses and leads to bugs. What is right/wrong is not as important as all others doing it the other way. -- Alain Williams Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer. +44 (0) 787 668 0256 http://www.phcomp.co.uk/ Parliament Hill Computers Ltd. Registration Information: http://www.phcomp.co.uk/contact.php #include std_disclaimer.h -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Fix the Tenary Operator -- Please!? Please?
It's not a feature though - it's a bug. It's just one of those bugs that the fixing of which may break something. On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 6:31 PM, Rowan Collins rowan.coll...@gmail.com wrote: On 26 March 2015 20:54:12 GMT, Michael Morris tendo...@gmail.com wrote: Per PHPsadness... http://phpsadness.com/sad/30 Since 7 is allowed to have BC breaks this would be the time to fix this. I'll let someone with more seniority actually write this up - but please, please fix this - it's a very long standing annoyance. I used to think this was a major nuisance, but recently thought about it and decided I've never once wanted to do this - the result is really ugly code whatever the associativity. What I've always been annoyed by is the *precedence* of the operator - having to add brackets to mix it with string concatenation, etc - which it turns out to is the same in all sorts of languages. Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP] -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
