Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:20131
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 09:52:11 +0200 (EET)
Reply-To: Jani Taskinen <sniper@iki.fi>
To: Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com>
cc: Andreas Korthaus <akorthaus@web.de>, internals@lists.php.net
In-Reply-To: <437D0E22.7080006@lerdorf.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.61.0511180950170.4255@arfg.argcubovn.sv>
References: <437B530A.5050105@prohost.org> <437CF6B4.5080207@web.de>
	<437CF943.7090800@lerdorf.com> <437D0D08.8060805@web.de> <437D0E22.7080006@lerdorf.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] dropping curly braces
From: sniper@iki.fi (Jani Taskinen)


     Just a friendly note from my PHP user side:

     We had 2 places where {} where used for accessing string.
     Took me 10 seconds to remove those with the help of
     the nice E_STRICT error. (filename, linenumber)

     --Jani


On Thu, 17 Nov 2005, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

>
> 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
>
>