First, a disclaimer. I know that there are some historical reasons for a lot of these things (i.e. Exceptions not appearing until PHP5) but that doesn’t change the current reality. Consider for instance filesystem functions in the standard extension:

$lines = file("/tmp/file.txt");

If the file “/tmp/file.txt” does not exist, depending on your php.ini settings (because display_errors should always be ‘Off’ on production systems), you may get something similar to the following output:

Warning: file(/tmp/file.txt) [function.file]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /path/to/your/docroot/test.php on line 3

Now the proper thing to do of course would be to verify up front that the file exists and is readable with a call to is_readable() or something similar, but imagine this is a case where there is no way to determine ahead of time if a warning or error will be generated (Derick mentions silencing network errors with stream_socket_client() as one example). In this case, you might be tempted to use the shut-up operator and depend on the return value as the one true way to see if something was succesful or not.

Now compare this with what languages like Python (for example) do, If you were to write similar code in Python:

fp = file("/tmp/file.txt")

If the file did not exist, you’ll get an IOError which, if left uncaught, will result in the following being written to standard error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 1, in <module>
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/tmp/test.txt'

The difference here of course is that an IOError can be caught, ignored or whatever best suits your needs. It’s a part of the language, the API is not just spewing out garbage to standard output or standard error. More importantly, having a function (or technically a constructor) like file() throw an exception follows a consistent design philosophy whereas PHP’s error system always leaves me guessing or consulting the docs.

I guess what I’m saying is that I think the shut-up operator is just one of those signs that PHP is suffering from some serious cruft and I don’t think those kinds of things bode well for a language.

• Pricing the Macbook Air so high with such low specs.
• Releasing an pitiful update to the air along with a nice $100 price increase.
• Doing away with the matte screen option.
• Pulling the remotes from being included with laptops (admittedly not a huge deal, but felt like salt on a wound).

Is it just me or is Apple becoming a little too arrogant? Anyway, I know Lenovo won’t be saints either, but at least in the non-Mac OS X world I can easily switch vendors down the road if I ever need to.