Anyone have experience with Zend Encoder? Cryptic var and comment ...

[dalecosp]

Have a system that runs atop the Zend encoder. Looking through somebody else's work, I see this:

$result = $db->FetchNextObject(false);
$settings = $this->_getConfiguration();
$settings; //to shut zend up

My guess is that _getConfiguration() does something but doesn't return any value ... but then I'd expect a null assignment ... anyone have any idea what this is for?

[bradgrafelman]

A null assignment wouldn't count as a "read"; $settings would still be a variable that was only written to but never read from. You're probably right about _getConfiguration() having some hidden side effect (despite the connotations of the 'get' prefix).

Sounds like a bad hack to quiet warnings about bad behavior. 🙂 Granted, I do something similar in C to document my I-know-this-returns-something-but-I-don't-care function calls, e.g.:

//bjg: ignore return value since default values are given even on failure...
( void )get_config( &s_config );

[dalecosp]

bradgrafelman wrote:

count as a "read"

I'm not sure I understand that concept.

bad hack to quiet warnings about bad behavior

I figured as much; knowing who wrote this code, "bad hack" might even be an understatement (at the very least, my supervisor has cringed a time or two when his name has come up).

That being said, I just expected that such code wouldn't parse ... I guess I'd never tried, though. Obviously, it does. I can't get it to throw an error, either.

Thanks for the reply, Brad 🙂

[bradgrafelman]

I was assuming some extra lint checking tools were being used. At work, we have such tools we run on our C code that give more insight than just compiler warnings and errors. One example is that it will throw a warning whenever it shows that you only store data in a variable (e.g. "write" to it) but you never actually use that data anywhere (e.g. "read" from it).

[dalecosp]

I see. I'm guessing lots of IDE's have that feature. I was just reading it in terminal as I've little desire to load the whole mess into NetBeans. That does make sense, though .... thanks!