As of PHP 8.1, PHP will start throwing deprecation warnings along the lines of:
Deprecated: Return type of [CLASS]::[METHOD]() should either be compatible with [PHP NATIVE INTERFACE]::[METHOD](): [TYPE], or the #[ReturnTypeWillChange] attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice
Basically, as of PHP 8.1, these methods in classes which implement PHP native interfaces are expected to have a return type declared.
The return type can be the same as used in PHP itself or a more specific type. This complies with the Liskov principle of covariance, which allows the return type of a child overloaded method to be more specific than that of the parent.
As this package has a minimum PHP requirement of PHP 5.2 based on the composer.json file, the return type (PHP 7.0 feature) can not be added, so I've added the attribute instead.
While attributes are a PHP 8.0 feature only, due to the syntax choice for #[], they will ignored in PHP < 8 and can be safely added.
Note: I've not applied this patch to the src/PHP52/SplFixedArray.php file as that file is only loaded on PHP 5.2, so would not run into this issue.
As of PHP 8.1, PHP will start throwing deprecation warnings along the lines of:
These type of deprecation notices relate to the Return types for internal methods RFC in PHP 8.1.
Basically, as of PHP 8.1, these methods in classes which implement PHP native interfaces are expected to have a return type declared. The return type can be the same as used in PHP itself or a more specific type. This complies with the Liskov principle of covariance, which allows the return type of a child overloaded method to be more specific than that of the parent.
As this package has a minimum PHP requirement of PHP 5.2 based on the
composer.jsonfile, the return type (PHP 7.0 feature) can not be added, so I've added the attribute instead.While attributes are a PHP 8.0 feature only, due to the syntax choice for
#[], they will ignored in PHP < 8 and can be safely added.Note: I've not applied this patch to the
src/PHP52/SplFixedArray.phpfile as that file is only loaded on PHP 5.2, so would not run into this issue.