Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:20103
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Message-ID: <437CF943.7090800@lerdorf.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 13:42:27 -0800
User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5 (Macintosh/20051025)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Andreas Korthaus <akorthaus@web.de>
CC: internals@lists.php.net, Ilia Alshanetsky <ilia@prohost.org>
References: <437B530A.5050105@prohost.org> <437CF6B4.5080207@web.de>
In-Reply-To: <437CF6B4.5080207@web.de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] dropping curly braces
From: rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf)

Andreas Korthaus wrote:

> Can someone tell me the reason for this decision?

Very few people converted to using {} so the argument about reading old 
code doesn't really hold.  If you go and grep through all the public 
code out there, pretty much none of it uses {} for character offsets. 
And internally there is absolutely no difference between {} and []. 
Having two syntaxes for the same thing makes no sense, and getting rid 
of [] would break all sorts of stuff.  The original reason for the {} 
was a technical one to simplify the parser, but the landscape has 
changed and that reason no longer exists.

As far a code readability and obviousness goes, I doubt anybody would 
guess their way to the $str{5} syntax.  If you were new to PHP and you 
were going to try to guess how you would get a character offset in a 
string, what would your first guess be?  Most non-PHP people I have 
asked have answered [].  Removing the obvious syntax just doesn't make 
any sense.  The other place {} is used outside of control blocks is in 
quoted strings where "{$foo{1}}" is much uglier than "{$foo[1]}".

-Rasmus