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Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 12:58:26 -0000
Message-ID: <CDA511FF6152D14E922434CE338CE8BB27582F@leedsmet-exch1.leedsmet.ac.uk>
Thread-Topic: [PHP-DEV] dropping curly braces
Thread-Index: AcXrwFoG7yMTmnJfRvCeON/O4IaG0gAfK+ZQ
To: <internals@lists.php.net>
Subject: RE: [PHP-DEV] dropping curly braces
From: M.Ford@leedsmet.ac.uk ("Ford, Mike")

On 17 November 2005 21:42, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

> Andreas Korthaus wrote:
>=20
> > Can someone tell me the reason for this decision?
>=20
> Very few people converted to using {} so the argument about
> reading old
> code doesn't really hold.  If you go and grep through all the public
> code out there, pretty much none of it uses {} for character offsets.
> And internally there is absolutely no difference between {} and [].

So all of those who belived the "[] for string access is deprecated" line (=
or simply prefer the visual differentiation) and have 10s of thousands of l=
ines of code with liberal use of $string{} are going to have to spend ages =
fixing that up?

> Having two syntaxes for the same thing makes no sense,

I don't buy this -- having two ways of doing certain things is one feature =
that makes PHP so great -- it increases the user base who find it easy to u=
se, as they can pick the method that makes most sense to them.  I love the =
{} syntax, so let me use it.  You don't -- fine, don't use it.  (I won't co=
nvert to [] -- I'll go for substr(..,..,1) instead).  Another example: I ha=
te proliferating {} for control structures and use exclusively the if (): .=
.. endif; form -- fine, let me use it; your preference may be otherwise, bu=
t that's fine too.  In the end, each of us gets the PHP syntax we find easi=
est to use, without denying the other his preference.  What's so wrong with=
 that?


> As far a code readability and obviousness goes, I doubt anybody would
> guess their way to the $str{5} syntax.  If you were new to
> PHP and you
> were going to try to guess how you would get a character offset in a
> string, what would your first guess be?

Well, it wouldn't be [] because I'd guess that's for array access as in oth=
er languages.  I probably wouldn't guess at all, but look it up, and be ver=
y happy to find it was {}.  I remember being very, very surprised to find [=
] doing double duty, and glad that {} existed as an alternative.

Cheers!

Mike

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