[development] low hanging fruit for Drupal 6: variable defaults

[Steven Wittens]

> What happens if you have a variable whose default is TRUE but for  
> which the
> set value is FALSE at the moment? I think in that case
>
>        return $value ? $value : constant($name);
>
> is going to give you the constant instead of the perfectly-valid  
> assigned value,
> isn't it?

I think Dries was more trying to illustrate a point. It is trivial to  
change this so it doesn't suffer from this problem:

function variable_get($name) {
   $value = db_query(...);
   return db_num_rows($value) ? db_result($value) : constant($name);
}

We've introduced such automatic linking based on naming conventions  
elsewhere in core too (e.g. menu argument handling, form api  
callbacks, theme functions, etc), so this idea gets a bit +1 from me.  
I always liked the idea of centralizing your defaults like this, but  
I hated that it didn't save you from repeating the defined constant  
everywhere.

Steven Wittens