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To: "Ford, Mike" <M.Ford@leedsmet.ac.uk>
Cc: Brian Moon <brianm@dealnews.com>, internals@lists.php.net
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Organization: InterJinn
Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2007 09:41:34 -0500
Message-ID: <1170772895.9567.4.camel@blobule>
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Subject: RE: [PHP-DEV] [SPAM] Re: [PHP-DEV] Syntactic improvement to array
From: robert@interjinn.com (Robert Cummings)

On Tue, 2007-02-06 at 14:08 +0000, Ford, Mike wrote:
> On 05 February 2007 17:29, Brian Moon wrote:
> > That is why you have coding standards.  Our doucment states that this
> > should be written as: 
> > 
> > $a = array(
> > 	1 => array('pears', 'apples'),
> > 	2 => array('juice', 'oranges')
> > );
> > 
> > I believe in either syntax, proper formatting of complex data
> > can solve
> > the readablity problems.
> 
> Solve, no.  Alleviate, yes.
> 
> Given the above, the layout tells me there's some kind of structure
> going on, but I still have to actually *read* it to discover
> that there are arrays involved (and where they start and end).
> 
> With this version:
> 
>   $a = [
>  	 1 => ['pears', 'apples'],
>  	 2 => ['juice', 'oranges']
> 	];
> 
> I can take one glance and tell there are nested arrays involved, and
> what their scopes are -- I'd say my comprehension speed is at least
> an order of magnitude faster!
> 
> *That* makes this syntax a no-brainer for me, personally ;-)

Ummm, you still had to read it. One "glance" just so happens to involve
the brain grokking the content, just like reading.

Cheers,
Rob.
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