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To: Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com>
Cc: Ilia Alshanetsky <ilia@prohost.org>,
	Andreas Korthaus <akorthaus@web.de>, internals@lists.php.net
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Organization: InterJinn
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Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 19:17:30 -0500
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] dropping curly braces
From: robert@interjinn.com (Robert Cummings)

On Thu, 2005-11-17 at 19:05, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
> Robert Cummings wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-11-17 at 18:33, Ilia Alshanetsky wrote:
> >> Andreas Korthaus wrote:
> >>> 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... ;-)
> >> You may think that {} and [] are different, but in reality same code
> >> deals with both. Having two constructs for the same behavior is silly
> >> and leads to confusing, hard to read code. Especially so when you
> >> consider the fact {} has another meaning that is completely different.
> > 
> > That should have been considered before everyone was told that [] was
> > deprecated for strings in favour of {}. 
> 
> Right, that was a mistake which we are fixing now.  Removing [] doesn't 
> seem to be a viable option, so rather than continue to tell people to 
> stop using [] since it is never going to go away, the main decision here 
> was to undeprecate [].  Whether we will eventually remove {} or not 
> remains to be seen.  The initial idea was to try to remove it in PHP6 
> and in order to help people easily find where these are used, add an 
> E_STRICT for it in PHP 5.1.

Ok, then that's not so bad. PHP6 is undoubtedly some ways off giving
adequate time to revert such code. I hate that sneaky E_STRICT stuff :)
BTW, I'm with the other guys on the convention argument too. I find that
reading my code now that I've gotten into the habit of always using {}
for strings, that I can easily pick out where my string indexing is
happening versus array indexing.

Cheers,
Rob.
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