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Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 18:17:11 -0500
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To: Ilia Alshanetsky <ilia@prohost.org>
CC: Jani Taskinen <sniper@iki.fi>,  internals@lists.php.net
References: <4e36d31d0510261018t639c472x9efaaf7af61a9ddb@mail.gmail.com> <Pine.LNX.4.61.0510262230020.11940@arfg.argcubovn.sv> <435FDC41.30207@php.net> <435FF414.3000303@prohost.org>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: foreach with null
From: greg@chiaraquartet.net (Greg Beaver)

Ilia Alshanetsky wrote:
> Greg Beaver wrote:
> 
>>amen, this behavior makes no sense even though sizeof() is an alias to
>>count().  sizeof('this') and sizeof('this long thing') are both 1, which
>>makes no sense.  I would go so far as to say a E_NOTICE is more
>>appropriate than E_STRICT - you should only be using count() for
>>arrays/objects.
> 
> 
> Actually this result makes perfect sense since type conversion changes
> string into array('your string') and does a count of that, which is 1.

Yes, it makes sense from this perspective, but from a real-life
programming perspective it is

1) useless - count() provides no useful information about strings
2) potentially buggy.

For instance, PEAR's XML_Unserializer (XML_Serializer package)
represents XML elements with simple text node children as a string, and
tags with anything else (attributes, child elements) as an array.
Improperly written code that uses count() without checking is_array()
would happily run with no warning whatsoever.  However, imho it would
make PHP more robust if the logical error condition were also a language
error, that's all.

Greg