On 03/06/2019 09:28, Jean-Baptiste DELHOMMEAU wrote:
I would like to awaken the discussion around the RFC Nullsage Calls :
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/nullsafe_calls
Personally, I have my suspicions that PHP is starting to expose itself
to operator fatigue. There have been quite a few suggestions made over
the last couple of years that want to add new operators that would just
serve as syntax sugar for a niche problem (for example, chaining) but
serve to make things more convoluted than they need to be.
That said, let me now proceed to be a massive hypocrite and propose a
new operator, because IMO we should be looking to gain the most general
benefit out of the operators that are added.
Let's try and find a wider solution, for example, right now if you try
to chain things that hit a null, an Error object is thrown... so maybe
we could use that.
There's also been lots of calls for more built-in functions to throw
exceptions rather than writing notices and errors, and so the use of try
/ catch would become more prominent with that as well.
But... a 5 line try/catch block can be a pain, so maybe we could create
a shorthand that would return a particular value whenever an exception
was thrown?
Instead of ...
try {
$result = $x->y()->z();
}
catch (Error $ex) {
$result = null;
}
$result = attempt $x->y()->z(), Error => null;
(I couldn't immediately think of a way of modifying 'try' that wouldn't
mess the parser if opening curly braces weren't used).
Derive a new NullObjectError from Error, throw it in the relevant spot,
and you've now got a way of handling things where you can specify your
own value.
$result = attempt $x->y()->z(), NullObjectError => null;
Out of it we would get a shorthand way of handling large numbers of
future throws and "restore" their error-condition-by-return-value
behaviour where you're more concerned that it failed, than with the
actual error message.
return attempt database_query('...'), DatabaseException => null;
I know this is a huge tangent, I just wanted to throw it out there as a
possible option for handling chaining, that would potentially kill many
more birds down the road in the process.
--
Mark Randall
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