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Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:11:59 -0700
Message-ID: <698DE66518E7CA45812BD18E807866CE01AB3D1D@us-ex1.zend.net>
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Thread-Topic: [PHP-DEV] deprecation status of $str{42} versus $str[42]
Thread-Index: AcjLT6avrZepf3sfQtqx40rYEZRxFgAKQFpw
References: <77972256-ED0C-4FCE-8DEF-8283FE1BBFC5@roshambo.org> <484F0897.4040405@fischer.name> <1213139582.12765.5.camel@localhost>
To: "Lars Strojny" <lars@strojny.net>,
	"Markus Fischer" <markus@fischer.name>
Cc: "PHP Developers Mailing List" <internals@lists.php.net>
Subject: RE: [PHP-DEV] deprecation status of $str{42} versus $str[42]
From: andi@zend.com ("Andi Gutmans")

Hi,

$str{} was considered a best practice for a while so as you can see via
Google Code Search it's been used quite a bit.
I take the blame for introducing it with the intention to not only
create a better separation between arrays and string offsets but by also
then allowing for a cleaner implementation for string offsets.
Unfortunately I never delivered that cleaner implementation esp. as
there didn't seem a huge benefit

I don't have strong feelings either way esp. as moving from $str{} to
$str[] is scriptable but given that so many people have used it and
there are benefits to separating the two (it also resolves an ambiguity)
I'd like to put another option out there which is to try and see if we
can actually follow through on original intentions of also delivering
technical benefit in addition to the syntax separation.

Andi