PHP Internals News: Episode 99: Allow Null and False as Standalone Types

PHP Internals News: Episode 99: Allow Null and False as Standalone Types

Thursday, March 10th 2022, 09:04 GMT London, UK

In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with George Peter Banyard (Website, Twitter, GitHub, GitLab) about the "Allow Null and False as Standalone Types" RFC that he has proposed.

The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news

Transcript

Derick Rethans 0:15

Hi, I'm Derick. Welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to explain the latest developments in the PHP language. This is episode 99. Today I'm talking with George Peter Banyard, about the Allow null and false at standalone types RFC that he's proposing. Hello, George Peter, would you please introduce yourself?

George Peter Banyard 0:36

Hello, my name is George Peter Banyard. I work on the PHP language, and I'm an Imperial student in maths in my free time.

Derick Rethans 0:44

Are you're trying to say you're a student in your free time or contribute to PHP in your free time?

George Peter Banyard 0:49

I feel like at this time, it's like, both are true at the same time.

Derick Rethans 0:53

Let's hop into this RFC. It is titled allow null and false as standalone types. What is the problem that it is trying to solve?

George Peter Banyard 1:02

This is the second iteration of this RFC. So the first one was to just allow null initially, and null is the unit type In type theory parlance of PHP, ie the type which only has one value. So null is a type and a value. And the main issue is that when for leads more with like inhabitants, and like the Liskov substitution principle. If you have like a method, like the parent method, which can be told like either null or an object, and your implementation in a child class always returns null, for various reasons, maybe because it doesn't support this feature, or whatever is out, or... If your child method only returns null, currently, you can't document, that you can't type this properly, you can document it in a doc comment or something like that. But due to how PHP type handling works, you need to specify at least like another type with null in the union. Basically resort to always saying like mimicking the parent signature, when you could be more specific. This was the main use case I initially went into.

Derick Rethans 2:08

If I understand correctly, you can't just have an inherited method that has hinted as to just return null?

George Peter Banyard 2:14

Exactly. If you always return null, maybe because you always work or something like that, then you must still declare the return type as like null or exception, which is not a concrete because you say what, like why never fail. And like static analysers, if they can figure it out that you're using a child class, they can't maybe like do some assumptions or work further down that like what you're doing is redundant or things like that. So that's one of the main reasons I initially went with it. And I didn't add false initially, because it was like, well, false, it's not really a type properly. It's, it's what's called a value type. False is one value from the Boolean type. And I was like, Well, okay, we're just going to limit it to like, being the type theory purist, limited to proper types, where null is a proper type, although it's a bit sometimes misunderstood, I feel in the PHP community at large. And then people were like, well, if we add null, then by the only type-ish thing, which you can use in a type declaration, or whatever, which can't be used in a return type on its own, is false. And it's just weird. So why not add it in full. So that was the second thing as to why I added it. Some of PHP internal's functions being terribly designed because they were designed back in the early noughties, return null on success and false on failure, which you can't probably type at the moment. Currently, we need to type them as like Boolean or null, but true can never be returned in this case. And there are some other some other people have reached out to me it's like, well, yeah, but I always return false in this case. Or I also return always true in this case, although true, we have this weird asymmetry that we have false as a value type and not true.

Derick Rethans 3:49

What was the reason for having false but not true?

George Peter Banyard 3:53

When the union type RFC got discussed and passed for PHP 8.0, false was added, because a lot of traditional behaviour of PHP internal functions, was to return false on failure, instead of the technically more correct thing would be to return null. Because loads of functions return a false on failure, and saying that like in returns, these types, or a Boolean would be basically lying because you could never have true, false was included in it. With the restrictions that you can only use false as the complement with other types. So you need to do for example, array, or false, you couldn't just use false.

Derick Rethans 4:37

Would it also mean that you can define a return type of a method that inherited a method that returns a bool, as false?

George Peter Banyard 4:48

Yes, that would be now possible with the amended proposal. Yeah, which goes back to this weird a symmetry, we're probably. Adding true to make a complete would be a future RFC to do.

Derick Rethans 5:00

Now, we've talked about return types. But I guess the reverse applies to arguments?

George Peter Banyard 5:06

Arguments and property types also would, would be allowed to, like declare themselves as like null or false. The usefulness here is way more limited. Because if you declare an argument to be of type null, then basically you can only ever pass a null to it. And then therefore, the type doesn't do anything.

Derick Rethans 5:26

But in an inherited method, you could then widen it.

George Peter Banyard 5:31

Yes, exactly. You could always say: Well, this argument exists, it's always null. If you extend like your class or message, then you can add other types. But in theory, you can already do that by adding like an argument at the end of the message, because that's LSP compliant. The case for, and properties of those, because they are typing, they're in like their beads. Kind of debatable why you would do that. But it's just that like, well, if you accept types at one point, just restricting them like somewhere else gets very weird. At this point is more like look at the human review, or like use static analysis for the analyser to tell you like this argument is redundant and just remove it or this property doesn't make any sense. Because if it can only ever be null, why does it even exist in the first place?

Derick Rethans 6:13

Right now, you can already use false in union types, but why not with null or false?

George Peter Banyard 6:19

That goes back to the when a union type RFC got introduced. Null got added as a keyword. Before you could only use the question mark, before a type to make the type nullable. If you have a more complex union type, to not use the question mark in front of it. Therefore, the null keyword got added as a proper type. And because the logic was, Well, you shouldn't ever be able to return just null. Because then that function is kind of equivalent to void. Because of that, it was said that like, Well, okay, null and false basically have like kind of the same status is that like, if you just want to use null on its own, you're doing something kind of weird. And if you're returning more than false, like that signature is very strange. I think when that was discussed, nobody knew initially that an actual PHP function within one of the extensions, like in core had such a weird signature. Which mainly, we just started discovering that after this got, like accepted and we could like actually start properly typing the internal f