31–40 of 51 posts
I don't see why it should return null. If "" == 0, meaning "" is coerced to 0, shouldn't it coerce to 0 here too?
A bit unrelated to the discussion... but will anyone be surprised if they get a couple of cents more (or less) on their retirement? From the report: "Each of those changes will have to be coded, tested, written-off, released, tested by the clients since this is tax data and has to be precise for tax planning and retirement planning." From the documentation: "string number_format ( float $number [, int $decimals ] )"
Passing a string instead of a float and expecting it to behave a certain way is undocumented. Oh my! Relying on undocumented behavior... a simple duh in the production world.
I'm not adding to the conversation, and I realize this. But simply my $0.02.
Interesting discussion in there, but I think the PHP guys are right on this one. You should never rely on undefined behavior of any API for mission critical code. Always use what is documented so you don't have to cry later..
I remember posting similar sentiments on Reddit about 3 years ago and getting downmodded to oblivion. In hindsight, I think I was wrong and the herd was right. If you restrict yourself to what's documented, you'll miss out on most of the interesting and cutting-edge stuff. And that's what lets you build a cool, differentiated, useful project.
Instead, I think you should budget time and money for crying later. ;-)
A bit unrelated to the discussion... but will anyone be surprised if they get a couple of cents more (or less) on their retirement? From the report: "Each of those changes will have to be coded, tested, written-off, released, tested by the clients since this is tax data and has to be precise for tax planning and retirement planning." From the documentation: "string number_format ( float $number [, int $decimals ] )"
From the documentation is correct! Passing a string instead of a float and expecting it to behave a certain way is undocumented. Oh my! Relying on undocumented behavior... a simple duh in the production world. I'm not adding to the conversation, and I realize this. But simply my $0.02.
But simply my $NULL.
"Escalate? Oh how I wish I had someone to escalate to." Classic.
This is one of the reasons he's such a great leader. He's got a sense of humour, but he still explains it to you no matter what. Good guy.
"Escalate? Oh how I wish I had someone to escalate to." Classic.
You know what's more depressing? This clueless guy is one of the (wild guess) 5% of PHP users who can file a bug report and follow it...
I'm definitely on the PHP guys with this. A big criticism against PHP is that it's inconsistent in numerous ways. This bugfix is obviously part of an effort to standardize function behaviour. Go PHP!
So, when you say it's part of an effort to standardize behavior, I think you're right. But is this the right way to go? I mean, was the old behavior that bad? Why not just flag it as a warning and mark it as deprecated functionality? Then wait until version 6 to actually force the change.
I don't have a horse in this race, since I stopped using PHP when 5 was just coming out. One of those reasons was to avoid stuff like this...
"Escalate? Oh how I wish I had someone to escalate to." Classic.
I like his humility. Many people in these situations would be like: "Do you know who I am?"
"I'm the creator of PHP. I am not going to fix this," would have ended the discussion much sooner and with less hurt feelings.
He could've saved himself a lot of grief if his first reply had been:
Hi,
I'm sorry to hear this change has broken your existing code. We've been cleaning up undefined behaviours such as the one you're relying on in this release and this particular fix has been reviewed and accepted by the community over a 3 month period, so there's no chance to revert it now.
Going forward, you can either patch your code to stop relying on the undocumented behaviour (e.g. cast the string to a float) or you're also free to modify the PHP source to return to the previous behaviour - one of the benefits of relying on an open source framework.
Best regards, Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP
Sadly, this would never have appeared on HN and thus brightend up my Monday morning.
Although Rasmus is quite clearly right to have fixed the undefined behaviour and is probably quite charming in person, if anyone in our company responded to one of our customers like that, well, there'd be trouble. He could've saved himself a lot of grief if his first reply had been: Hi, I'm sorry to hear this change has broken your existing code. We've been cleaning up undefined behaviours such as the one you're rel…