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Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:11:30 -0800
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To: Andreas Korthaus <akorthaus@web.de>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] dropping curly braces
From: rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf)

Andreas Korthaus wrote:
>> As far a code readability and obviousness goes, I doubt anybody would 
>> guess their way to the $str{5} syntax.
> 
> But you know without understanding of any context, that it's the 6th 
> character of the string "$str". When you see $var[5], it could be the 
> 6th character of a string, or an element of an array... and what about 
> the value? You can't be sure that it's a string with length 1, it also 
> could be another array, an object, a string with length 4711...
> 
> That increases complexity and decreases readability.

Your argument falls apart there.  Try it:

$a = array("ab","cd","ef");
echo $a{2};

Guess what that prints?  {} has nothing to do with strings.  They are 
100% equivalent to [] and as such add nothing to clarity.

-Rasmus