On Wednesday, January 30, 2019 5:41:45 AM CST Nikita Popov wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 30, 2019 at 12:11 PM Dmitry Stogov <dmi...@zend.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > 
> > I've just noticed that Wordpress-4.1 on PHP master started silently
> > produce different output.
> > 
> > The problem that PHP master started to ignore old-style constructors.
> > 
> > They were deprecated in PHP-7 and PHP produced the following warning
> > 
> > 
> > Deprecated: Methods with the same name as their class will not be
> > constructors in a future version of PHP; ... has a deprecated constructor
> > 
> > 
> > PHP master doesn't produce any warnings and just constructs a class
> > without constructor.
> > 
> > This silent behavior change may become a problem for porting legacy code
> > to PHP-8,
> > 
> > May be, it makes sense to emit fatal error in case of old-style
> > constructor.
> > 
> > 
> > Thanks. Dmitry.
> 
> First of all, it is probably important to note that the RFC for this (
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/remove_php4_constructors) explicitly specifies
> that in PHP 8 methods with the same name as the class are interpreted as
> ordinary methods and no warning or error is thrown. I've CC'd Levi and
> Andrea, who authored this RFC.
> 
> I think as an end goal, what the RFC specifies is preferable for a number
> of reasons:
> 
>  * You should be able to call your methods whatever you like. PHP only
> reserves the __ prefix for itself.
>  * The behavior is consistent with classes inside namespaces, where methods
> with the same name as the class are treated as normal methods for a long
> time already.
>  * The fact that a method has the same name as the class may be completely
> incidental if it comes from a trait (see
> https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=77470). The trait does not control in which
> classes it may be used and which names those classes may have.

Every Drupal 7 or 8 site includes classes that have a method name the same as 
the class name, on the assumption that it's safe to do for a normal method in 
current PHP versions.  Making that suddenly a Fatal would be, er, bad. :-)

As others have noted, this is easily solved with static analysis tools.  
There's been discussion of WP moving to a PHP 7-based version of PHP sometime 
this year (no promises, but that's the scuttlebutt), which would let them 
convert to __construct() universally and safely well before PHP 8 becomes an 
issue.

--Larry Garfield

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