On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 12:52 PM Nikita Popov <nikita....@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 2:33 PM Bob Weinand <bobw...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hey,
> >
> > I feel like concatenation having the same precedence than addition and
> > subtraction is promoting programmers to make mistakes. Albeit typically
> > easy to catch ones, it is a quality of life change at least.
> >
> > Hence I'm proposing a RFC changing the precedences:
> > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/concatenation_precedence
> >
> > Bob
> >
>
> Similarly to the ternary associativity RFC, I've analyzed the top 2000
> composer packages and checked whether they would be affected by this
> change: https://gist.github.com/nikic/a4df3e8e18c7955c2c21cf6cdb4cbfaa
>
> The tl;dr is that there were 5 instances where behavior would change per
> this RFC, and all 5 of them are bugs in current code and would be
> interpreted correctly after this RFC.


Nikita,

I'm a bit worried that using this as a standard test suite may
(repeatedly?) give us a false sense of security to go ahead with
compatibility breaking changes.
Composer packages, almost by definition - tend to be of higher quality than
the 'average' PHP code (at the very least they're redistributable, but
arguably Composer users are more advanced than the average developer - even
more so those who publish packages).  On top of that - probably the some of
the most redistributed pieces of code in the PHP space - aren't covered by
Composer at all (e.g. WordPress).

Don't get me wrong - I think it's great to have this indicator, but unless
I'm missing something, it's far from being something we can thoroughly rely
on to determine whether a certain feature is commonly used or not.  A huge
chunk of the PHP codebase is completely invisible to us, and much of the
code that is visible to us does not reside inside Composer.

Zeev

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