Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:20159
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
To: "'Ford, Mike'" <M.Ford@leedsmet.ac.uk>,
	<internals@lists.php.net>
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 10:41:31 -0500
Organization: New York PHP
Message-ID: <002f01c5ec56$8e0b3950$3268cb92@MobileZ>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Thread-Index: AcXrwFoG7yMTmnJfRvCeON/O4IaG0gAfK+ZQAAGXPNA=
In-Reply-To: <CDA511FF6152D14E922434CE338CE8BB27582F@leedsmet-exch1.leedsmet.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: [PHP-DEV] dropping curly braces
From: lists@zaunere.com ("Hans Zaunere")
References: <CDA511FF6152D14E922434CE338CE8BB27582F@leedsmet-exch1.leedsmet.ac.uk>



Ford, Mike wrote on Friday, November 18, 2005 7:58 AM:
> On 17 November 2005 21:42, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
> 
> > Andreas Korthaus wrote:
> > 
> > > Can someone tell me the reason for this decision?
> > 
> > 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 [].

And most public code still uses hacks for register_globals, is insecure and
poorly written.

> 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 lines of code with liberal use of $string{} are going to
> have to spend ages fixing that up?

Sounds like they got us good!  No more listening to documentation for us...

> > Having two syntaxes for the same thing makes no sense,

And neither does arbitrarily removing one syntax; especially when that
syntax has been the recommended way of referencing characters in strings for
years.

> 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 use, 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 convert to [] -- I'll go for
> substr(..,..,1) instead).  Another example: I hate proliferating {}
> for control structures and use exclusively the if (): ... endif; form
> -- fine, let me use it; your preference may be otherwise, but that's
> fine too.  In the end, each of us gets the PHP syntax we find easiest
> to use, without denying the other his preference.  What's so wrong
> with that?

And with so much work to maintain backwards compatibility in the past, why
do we need this change now?  While we're changing things, let's standardize
function parameter ordering.

> > 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.    

Yup - if anything, let's remove [] as string access - then again, if it
ain't broke, why try to fix it?


---
Hans Zaunere / President / New York PHP
   www.nyphp.org  /  www.nyphp.com