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by zelphirkalt 1414 days ago
Python less predictable than PHP? In what world? In PHP standard library functions silently take a null instead of a string, even though they are string handling functions, hiding that mistake for the user of the language, until a later point in time, when the context has been lost and one needs to do silly debugging, until one finds the place where the null first was handled, while it should have raised an error. Such is the silly character of PHP standard library. Many functions also have multiple return types, which makes it difficult to simply use the result of one as input to another.

If predictability means to predict, that standard library will behave nonsensically, then yes, PHP has the one high predictability.
2 comments
samuellevy 1414 days ago
> silently take a null instead of a string

Oh, so you _haven't_ used any of the recent versions of PHP, then. You're just talking shit with no actual recent experience. Gotcha. Well, thanks for your input.

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zelphirkalt 1414 days ago
Look what I got here for you:

    docker run -it php:8.0 bash
    # php -a
    Interactive shell

    substr("abcdef", 3);
    // no result
-- Ah right, PHP does things differently than other almost every other language that has a REPL and I have to echo a value, which was just returned, even on the REPL ...

    php > echo substr("", 3);
-- Silently hiding the error. Idiocy.

    php > echo substr(null, 3);
-- Silently hiding the error. Idiocy.

    php > echo substr("abcdef", 3);
    def
Who is shit talking now? Are you suggesting, that all this is normal and OK? Nothing is fixed. It's still badly designed and probably will remain shitty like that, until PHP programmers finally realize, that this needs to be properly fixed.

EDIT: Of course the docs also do not mention this to happen at all and tell you, that the first argument must be a string. So I guess that means, that in PHP terms, null is a string. Great for type safety!

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tored 1414 days ago
These problems were fixed in PHP 8.0 and 8.1

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/engine_warnings

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate_null_to_scalar_internal_a...

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