PHP: a fractal of bad design

Wow, I did not know PHP was that bad. [Link]

There is a whole lot of action at a distance. Consider this code, taken from the PHP docs somewhere.

  @fopen('http://example.com/not-existing-file', 'r');

What will it do?

• If PHP was compiled with --disable-url-fopen-wrapper, it won’t work. (Docs don’t say what “won’t work” means; returns null, throws exception?) Note that this flag was removed in PHP 5.2.5.
• If allow_url_fopen is disabled in php.ini, this still won’t work. (How? No idea.)
• Because of the @, the warning about the non-existent file won’t be printed.
• But it will be printed if scream.enabled is set in php.ini.
• Or if scream.enabled is set manually with ini_set.
• But not if the right error_reporting level isn’t set.
• If it is printed, exactly where it goes depends on display_errors, again in php.ini. Or ini_set.

I can’t tell how this innocuous function call will behave without consulting compile-time flags, server-wide configuration, and configuration done in my program. And this is all built inbehavior.

And that is just a small sample.