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Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:26:47 +0100
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To: Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] dropping curly braces
From: akorthaus@web.de (Andreas Korthaus)

Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
> Andreas Korthaus wrote:
>> 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.
OK, but by dropping {} for strings you also remove the possibility to 
have a convention like "[] for arrays and {} for strings".
If I could decide I would drop {} for arrays and [] for strings, but I 
fear I will not be asked to decide... ;-)

Best regards
Andreas