Hi Stas,
Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
Hi!
type (or pseudo-type) to do this. We should add null as a return type
rather than void as null:
I don't think we should do either. The whole story bases on the premise
that it is very important to avoid functions that accidentally return
non-null value. I do not think this premise is valid - in fact, I think
overall number of errors caused by this is so small that we already
spent collectively more time on discussing this than would be ever saved
over lifetime of PHP by introduction of this check. The only practical
(in a wide sense of the word) use of the void/null type there would be
making PHP functions more like ones in other languages, where you can
(actually, in most cases, must) declare functions void, so we obviously
need to have that too. In my book, this is not a very necessary thing.
There is a quite important use-case I've been informed of (alas I cannot
recall who by), and it was one of the things that motivated me to revive
the RFC. For interfaces, it's important to be strict in your
definitions, so you don't end up with implementation-defined behaviour
that people accidentally rely on. One of the problems that crops up is
that you can't currently specify that an interface method doesn't return
anything. This means that implementations sometimes add return values,
and functions get written that rely, unintentionally, on objects with
that interface having that behavioury. With the `void` type,
implementations of an interface are forbidden from returning a return
value, so this issue goes away.
Thanks.
--
Andrea Faulds
http://ajf.me/
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