On Thu, 2013-10-17 at 08:25 +0100, Joe Watkins wrote:
Morning All,
I'd like to draw some attention to how poor assertions are in PHP.
The current assertion API is not usable in my opinion; it has a
considerable overhead, relies on eval(), and is generally poorly
implemented.
I don't have a strong opinion on this, but mind that by being based on
eval the assert expression can use features from a different version of
PHP. Something like
if (PHP_VERSION_ID >= 50300) {
assert('foo\\bar::baz == 42');
}
the new form
if (PHP_VERSION_ID >= 50300) {
assert foo\\bar::baz == 42;
}
would give a parse error on older versions.
(Yes, I'm using 5.3 and <5.3 as example where the new form would fail
anyways, feel free to use PHP_VERSION_ID >= 51200 and PHP 5.26.0
features)
This means that assert("some code here") will pass assertion
causing no error, because strings are no longer treated as code,
because eval is evil();
I think this is bad for migration of code. For one it is impossible to
have a code base with asserts working in both versions. For two it
silently leads to completely different behavior. Changing this needs
some clever strategy allowing migration.
johannes