On 6/20/07, Jim Wilson <wilson.jim.r(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Since not returning anything in PHP is equivalent (more or less) to
returning null, is there any concern that the extension writer's intent
was
to do so? Or is this simply a massive case of forgotten "return true"
statements?
I believe it's "simply a massive case of forgotten 'return true'
statements."
I totally agree that the the forgetting of return true is a big problem -
I've done it myself. I'm just not fully
convinced that throwing a full
stop
is the best answer. (I'd like to hear what others think on the matter).
Personally, I find this to be a good solution. I've lately become quite used
to fail-fast languages such as java, and I've found that such eager
exception throwing *really* helps you to not make such simple mistakes that
result in hours of debugging. It's much better to have something explode on
you than have programs that pretend to work, but with subtle and
hard-to-find bugs.
I frankly can't think of a situation where someone would *need* to return
null--at least, I've not seen a case of it yet; I'm sure in cases where you
want to return null, you can get by fine with returning true. Could you
perchance think of an example where this would be necessary?
--
Daniel Cannon (AmiDaniel)
http://amidaniel.com
cannon.danielc(a)gmail.com