PHP: a fractal of bad design (fuzzy notepad)

PHP: a fractal of bad design (fuzzy notepad)

Posted Apr 22, 2012 12:25 UTC (Sun) by IkeTo (subscriber, #2122)
In reply to: PHP: a fractal of bad design (fuzzy notepad) by ajf
Parent article: PHP: a fractal of bad design (fuzzy notepad)

You're right. The following program exhibit the said behavior:

public class T {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Integer a = 1000;
        int b = 1000;
        Integer c = 1000;
        System.out.println(a == b && b == c && a != c);
    }
}

Amazingly, there is another ways to cause the said behavior using only primitive types. (See IPSC 2008 Problem C).

And yes, I just try to be humorous when I said "even Java equality is not transitive". PHP is so horribly broken that I won't even touch it with a ten feet pole.

On the other hand, if even the very well specified Java language has non-transitive equality, you can expect that most other languages have similar behavior. One thus cannot just say a language is bad because of it. Instead, one would instead say something like "PHP equality has very surprising behavior that makes it very undesirable for programmers".

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