On 15 October 2015 20:33:04 BST, Andrea Faulds <a...@ajf.me> wrote: >> Obviously, type hints for internal functions are a bit weird anyway, >but >> there's no reason to assume that every function documented as void >would >> suddenly be annotated in the Engine as such and start returning >notices. > >Why shouldn't it? For the scalar types, internal and userland functions behave >almost the same.
Just for the same reason that an existing function that uses bare "return;" won't automatically be considered "void" - nobody has explicitly decided that that's the intent. Sure, internal functions whose value shouldn't be used *could* be marked void, and those would start raising Notices if that was part of void's behaviour. But there would only be a blizzard of Notices if someone bulk updated every function in core which happens to return null, which doesn't seem like an automatic part of creating a void return behaviour. Especially if the whole point is that "void" signifies something more than "always returns null". Since it's been mentioned a couple of times, I'd like to say that although the documentation is official, I think it should be considered descriptive not prescriptive - if it labels something as void, but the Engine doesn't consider it so, the manual would be wrong, not the Engine. Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]
