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Inconsistency in argument default handling with null support enabled

Description

I found an inconsistency in Lucee where function argument defaults aren't applied when

  • the UDF was called via argumentCollection with not all args supplied

  • named arguments were used

  • full null support is enabled

When null support is off, in all cases the default value is applied to arg2, however when null support is switched on, the default value isn’t used but ONLY when using named arguments. The default value is still used when positional arguments are used. I’m not sure which behavior is considered “correct”, but I would prefer to see the default values used in this case. i.e. arg2 should not just be null, but fully undefined.

This has caused this related ticket in ColdBox:

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Zac Spitzer 9 August 2024 at 09:36
Edited

this behaviour has been resolved in Lucee 6, 5.4 still behaves as described,

I’ll set the fixed version to the latest build, and affects version to the current 5.4 release

I don’t know when it was actually fixed

Pothys - MitrahSoft 7 June 2022 at 14:55

I've checked this ticket with the latest version 5.3.10.10-SNAPSHOT. Yes, lucee has inconsistency with handling the named and positional argument with full null support. Also, have incompatibility with ACF. Seems ACF takes default value ("default 2") for args2 in both cases.

dan.switzer@givainc.com 3 June 2022 at 17:52

It looks like this is caused by the way difference in the way Lucee handles named arguments vs positional arguments.Here's a Gist which adds a dump to the arguments scope:

When you run that, you can see that when named arguments are passed, the function dumps:

arg1

456

arg2

null

But when positional arguments are used, you just get:

arg1

256

There is no arg2.

This seems like a bug to me. Even when named arguments are supplied, if an argument is undefined then it should stay undefined.

It's one of the reasons why the concept of null and undefined in a scripting language like JS have always made sense to me (and I know that's contrary to what a lot of devs think). I see null as a way to say "I'm aware of this variable, but I have no idea what it's value should be" and undefined is saying "What? I've never heard of such a thing".

In this case, arg2 isn't null it's undefined. It was never defined in the arguments and has no default value.

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Created 3 June 2022 at 17:39
Updated 9 August 2024 at 09:38