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Message-ID: <10845a340710090347g13cc7a37x1d16c81d7851537@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2007 11:47:18 +0100
Reply-To: RQuadling@GoogleMail.com
To: "Scott MacVicar" <scott@macvicar.net>
Cc: "Stefan Walk" <stefan.walk@physik.tu-darmstadt.de>, 
	"Antony Dovgal" <tony@daylessday.org>, 
	"Ford, Mike" <M.Ford@leedsmet.ac.uk>, internals@lists.php.net
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References: <93ED589E60BA254F97435FE6C97F2C672DE125@leedsmet-exch1.leedsmet.ac.uk>
	 <470B45E1.1030403@daylessday.org>
	 <470B4E32.2020703@physik.tu-darmstadt.de>
	 <470B5788.3090100@macvicar.net>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] substr/array_slice in []
From: rquadling@googlemail.com ("Richard Quadling")

On 09/10/2007, Scott MacVicar <scott@macvicar.net> wrote:
> Sure it works fine when it's been in the language for several years and
> it's guaranteed to be available in the version provided by your hosting
> company.
>
> In reality this isn't the case with PHP so everyone will end up using
> the older method to support backwards compatibility or mixing it and
> causing confusion.
>
> Scott

OOI. If the ISP is not on the version which would have this particular
"feature", how would I create a fallback solution for my clients?

Something like PEAR's PHP Compat library. Very useful for giving
support to newer functionality.

I think I wouldn't bother with the new feature for a while. Maybe if
it was major version only (V5 vs V6 is nice and clean, but V5.2.4 vs
V5.2.5 is not so easy for some clients to understand that new
functionality - rather than bug fixes - requires an upgrade).

But having a working method already seems redundant, simply for syntactic sugar.


>
> Stefan Walk wrote:
> > Antony Dovgal wrote:
> >> Right, so let's force other people to learn crappy unreadable syntax
> >> duplicating nice and clear function call
> > Oddly, this "crappy unreadable syntax" doesn't lead to any confusion or
> > complaints for newbies of languages like python or ruby, judging from
> > the IRC channels. And it's also odd that ruby users, where String#[] is
> > just an alias for String#slice, prefer this "crappy unreadable syntax"
> > over a "nice and clear" method call. One starts to wonder ...
> >
> > Regards,
> > Stefan

-- 
-----
Richard Quadling
Zend Certified Engineer : http://zend.com/zce.php?c=ZEND002498&r=213474731
"Standing on the shoulders of some very clever giants!"