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Reply-To: "=?iso-8859-1?Q?Jevon=20Wright?=" <jevon@jevon.org>
To: "Rasmus Lerdorf" <rasmus@lerdorf.com>
Cc: internals@lists.php.net
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 12:19:51 -1100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] dropping curly braces
From: jevon@jevon.org ("=?iso-8859-1?Q?Jevon=20Wright?=")

Is there anything wrong with having a convention for character access of strings? Most PHP programmers see {} as string access and [] as array access - sure, they might be functionally identical, but its the convention which is important.

Jevon


>  -------Original Message-------
>  From: Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com>
>  Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] dropping curly braces
>  Sent: 17 Nov '05 12:11
>  
>  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
>  
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