Inconsistency in PHP 8.5 deprecation of terminating case with semicolon

On Tue, October 14 2025 at 18:08 Juliette Reinders Folmer wrote: > Dear Theodore and list, > > I've been looking into the "Deprecate semicolon after case in switch statement" PHP 8.5 deprecation [1] > with the aim of adding a sniff for this to the PHPCompatibility standard and I'm noticing an oddity for > which I would like to clarify whether this is intentional or an oversight. > > As demonstrated in the example code provided in the deprecation RFC, both switch `case` condition > statements, as well as `default` statements, can be ended with a semicolon. > > So when I first read the RFC, I interpreted the proposal to include both `case` as well as `default`, > as, in my mind, `default` is just a special `case` in a switch. > > However, the RFC explicitly only talked about deprecating the use of a semicolon after a > `case` statement and the implementation has followed this to the letter. [2] > > The net result of this, is that you can now have a `switch` statement with semicolons > terminating `case` statements and `default` statements, where the former (`case`) will > result in a deprecation notice, while the latter (`default`) will not. For an example, see [3] > > This feels inconsistent to me and counter to the intention of the RFC, which is stated to be: > >> Case statements followed by a semicolon can cause confusion, as a developer may think they >> behave differently in some way from regular case statements (e.g. preventing fallthrough), >> when they do not. > > Which leaves me wondering what the reason was not to _also_ deprecate the use of a semicolon > to terminate a `default` statement in a switch ? I can't find any discussion about this in the > original mailing list thread [4]. > > Anyone would care to clarify ? Hi Juliette, Thank you for pointing out the discrepancy. You are correct that `default` is just a special case statement, and the intention in the RFC was to output the deprecation message for default cases as well (the example in the RFC included a default case followed by a semicolon to highlight this). The fact that a deprecation message isn't shown for default cases is an oversight on my part when I implemented the RFC. The merged implementation correctly updated the AST for default case statements followed by a semicolon to support the deprecation message, but I failed to notice that when the compiler code loops over switch cases, there is a `continue` statement when handling the default case which prevents reaching the code for the deprecation. I opened a follow-up pull request to fix this, which can hopefully be merged before PHP 8.5 is released: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/20172 Kind regards, Theodore > > Smile, > Juliette > > [1]: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecations_php_8_5#deprecate_semicolon_after_case_in_switch_statement > [2]: https://github.com/php/php-src/commit/5f8d648af6ef4e29a3c7f2b2029d08466c12bc6f > [3]: https://3v4l.org/liFIK/rfc#vgit.master > [4]: https://externals.io/message/126000