On 10/14/2015 06:30 PM, Andrea Faulds wrote:
Which I believe gives the following options:
1) Change the language behavior such that
function foo() : void { ...}
$a = foo();
Is a syntax error (because there really was nothing returned to assign),
rather than resulting in $a having a value of NULL.
As the RFC notes, this breaks things, and is inconsistent with how PHP
already does things.
2) Use null as a "type" (which I agree feels weird just saying it), such
that:
function foo() : null { ...}
$a = foo();
and
function foo() { ...}
$a = foo();
are identical. The former would impact the contents of the function
(eg, a non-empty return would be a parse error), but the external result
is the same ($a == NULL).
This would be strange. The manual doesn't say `null`, and I can't
think of any language which uses `null` as the return type in this
situation, even when they have the same implicit-null-return behaviour
that PHP has (see the email you're replying to).
Also, wouldn't you expect this to behave like existing type hints, and
let you return a null value from any source? But that's not what you
would actually want, right?
Thanks.
Well, that depends on the intent here. In practice, is the intent to
add a "no return at all" type of function (ie, $a = foo() is a syntax
error now where it was not before), or to make it explicit that the only
legal return is null (even if implicitly that means having a non-early
return statement is pointless)? Those are the two options. That may or
may not dictate the keyword that gets used.
It definitely sounds like you're favoring the second (as that's what the
RFC says). Which may or make not make "void" an odd keyword to choose
when what's actually happening is NULL getting returned. Is NULL a
void? (There's a deep philosophical question...)
As I said, I don't have a strong opinion on the subject yet. I'm just
trying to distil the discussion down to as small a question as possible. :-)
Cheers.
--Larry Garfield
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