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Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 10:45:54 -0000 
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Subject: RE: [PHP-DEV] Re: Negative string offset support
From: M.Ford@leedsmet.ac.uk ("Ford, Mike")

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On 30 October 2004 02:03, Andi Gutmans wrote:

> Nah that patch won't do because it'll effect [] also.
> It's more complicated than that. I've tried separating them in the
> past and it was annoying (and didn't have time to finish it off).

Well, according to the docs, the [] syntax is deprecated -- *if* the
[]and {} syntaxes are fully separated, and *if* functionality is
added to the {} syntax only, wouldn't this be a good time to
emphasize that deprecation and set an actual cutoff for it (such as
PHP 6.0?)?

Incidentally, I'd be about +100 (if my opinion counted for that
much!) for $string{-1}, purely for readability -- any performance
gain would be a bonus.

> At 05:51 PM 10/29/2004 -0700, Sara Golemon wrote:
> > 
> > > - People might want to take this even further and request {1,3},
> > >   {-3,2} and the like. (This was expressed in the past when
> > > talking about this   stuff) 
> > > 
> > They might... and the response to that is that it's a more
> > siginificant modification/glut of the exisiting code than merely
> > allowing negative offsets.  The fact is allowing negative string
> > offsets via the {} operator involves changing one line, and it's no
> > major waste of CPU cycles.  Full substr()esque behavior would be
> > more bloat-intensive of course and I'd be inclined to side against
> > that. 

I'd also be +several for folding substr() behaviour into the {} string
syntax -- I've often thought that if I ever have time to muck about
with the source, I'd like to make that my first little project.

(Incidentally, re another post, I'd expect $string{$m, $l} to be the
substring clone, and $string{$m:$n} to be "from offset $m to offset $n"
syntax -- and, personally, I'd like to see both.  But then, I'm a
programmer with over 20 years experience, so probably not your typical
PHP user at all, and I can quite see the argument about not cluttering
up PHP with potentially obscure syntaxes.  So I'll shut up now! ;)

Cheers!

Mike

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