We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP

Re:We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP by lifthrasiir on Friday June 22, 2012 @12:02AM (#4145322)

Regardless of the prior behavior, that particular behavior was not documented [1] and subject to change. I do think it is PHP's (very big) fault that the proper documentation on various edge cases is missing, but it is a bit too much to disallow PHP to change undocumented behaviors. That said, the proper documentation is not enough (and PHP does not get this right either); it's rather a mere prerequisite.

[1] http://php.net/number-format says the first argument expects float, and does not say what happens if it receives non-floats.

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Re:We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP by aethr on Friday June 22, 2012 @12:32AM (#4145417)

The specific usecase the bug reporter has provided DOES raise a warning, which he has intentionally routed to /dev/null

php -r 'print number_format("",0) . "\n";'

PHP Warning: number_format() expects parameter 1 to be double, string given in Command line code on line 1

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Re:We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP by soulclap on Friday June 22, 2012 @12:08AM (#4145343)

Well, exactly. It doesn't say what happens, so pass floats or expect the unexpected. I get your point but I don't think I have ever seen documentation anywhere that covers all of the possible 'abuse' scenarios.

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Re:We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP by lifthrasiir on Friday June 22, 2012 @12:15AM (#4145368)

It is possible to add a catch-all clause to the documentation. For example any non-float argument is converted to float via floatval(), or raises an error, and so on. This behavior can be made consistent across every API so that the documentation has only one place to describe it. PHP is missing this either AFAIK.

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Re:We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP by dpark on Friday June 22, 2012 @01:06AM (#4145505)

> This behavior can be made consistent across every API so that the documentation has only one place to describe it.

Sounds like that's what 'zend_parse_parameters' does, actually.

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Re:We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP by soulclap on Friday June 22, 2012 @12:20AM (#4145381)

I agree this would be ideal. Will definitely keep this in mind when writing documentation (and code) for my own tiny open source projects. All the double and triple checking just adds so much bloat most of the time...

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Re:We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP by josegonzalez on Friday June 22, 2012 @12:17AM (#4145372)

Documentation is hard, thats why most of it is open source. Pretty sure you can edit the php docs online if you so chose.

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