Is there any benefit of using null first in PHP?

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Why do some experienced programmers write comparisons with the value before the variable?

I am just curious about this: in most frameworks/opensource projects I have studied, I often seen code like this...

<?php

if (null === self::$_instance) {
    self::$_instance = new self();
}

In particular this line...

if (null === self::$_instance) {

Why use null in the first argument of the if statement instead of the other way around?...

if (self::$_instance === null) {

I realize there is probably no performance increase or anything like that. Is this just a preference or is it some kind of coding standard I have overlooked?

Answer 1

It's to help you get your code right.

If you do this, your code will work, but the effect will be a long way from what you want:

if (self::$instance = null) {

The conditional will always fail (because the = operator returns the value set, and it is falsy) but self::$instance will now be set to null. This isn't what you want.

If you do this:

if (null = self::$instance) {

your code will fail to work, because you can't use null (or any literal such as a string or an integer) on the left-hand-side of an assignment. Only variables can be the left-hand-side of the = operator.

So if you mistype the == as =, you get a parse error and your code completely doesn't work. This is preferable to a mystifying and hard-to-track-down bug.