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Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 15:16:56 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] dropping curly braces
From: r.korving@xit.nl ("Ron Korving")

I hear a lot of opinions here on the curly braces issue, and while I don't 
use them, they're not in the way. I'd say let's keep them in.


> > 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 
> other
> languages.  I probably wouldn't guess at all, but look it up, and be very
> happy to find it was {}.  I remember being very, very surprised to find []
> doing double duty, and glad that {} existed as an alternative.

You obviously have no C(++) experience. People with the C-background 
consider strings to be arrays of characters, and therefor it makes perfect 
sense to use [], just like it makes sense to use [] for strings in C.

I don't see a problem with {} however, and see no reason why it should be 
removed. I don't find it disturbing when I have to read someone's code 
containing {}, so why remove it and make a lot of people angry? I don't see 
the improvement except that certain warm and fuzzy feeling...

Ron