Power of base 0 and negative exponent is deprecated

Description

Requesting a negative exponent on 0 yields this error message. While PHP 8.3- used to generate INF as result, PHP 8.4 is moving toward generating a DivisionByZeroError: this will be set in PHP 9.0.

Example

<?php

$x = 0;

$y = $x ** -2;

?>

Solutions

• Check for 0 before raising a negative power. Positive powers are OK.

• Check for negative power before raising a power of 0.

• Use the PHP 8.4 function fpow() that has the future behavior, with a try/catch structure.