What the fuck is this. I swear every time I look at this codebase I find something more stupid than I did last time.

I can't wait to throw the whole legacy system away.

Gotta love that compression too

$mode || $mode = '0';

@Root $mode = $mode ?: 'defaultlang';

@ThatDannyBoy I prefer perl-like syntax 😋

@JustThat in php '0' is falsely so the second statement is always called after the first one.

@ThatDannyBoy Bloody hell I forgot about how infuriating and unintuitive php is.

@Root How is that unintuitive? Isn't that just a standard rule for languages without direct datatypes?

@PrivateGER in Perl '0' would be evaluated as true.

I prefer Perl syntax, too.

$mode or $mode = "defaultlang";

just looks nicer than the ternary operator with omitted second operand.
But that's a matter of taste, of course. I bet many people would prefer :? ...

@PrivateGER A non-empty string being falsey is unintuitive. Honestly, in typed languages I would prefer if nothing but false and null/undefined evaluate to false. Fewer accidental errors and unexpected behavior that way.

@PrivateGER Strings shouldn't cast to anything automatically IMO. Especially not on the server side. Manual casts don't bite, mixing input with runtime values does. For example by enforcing a cast maybe devs wouldn't forget to check for range of input numbers. In the past month I used 3 different websites that allowed buying -1.5 t-shirts

If that's the worst code in your legacy system then it sounds like you have a pretty cushy job

💯 my favorite kind of code

$mode = $mode ?? 'defaultlang';