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Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 23:59:59 +0200
To: Christian Schneider <cschneid@cschneid.com>,internals@lists.php.net
In-Reply-To: <3F96F754.1090800@cschneid.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Proposal: Dangling comma in function call
  parameters
From: andi@zend.com (Andi Gutmans)
References: <3F96F754.1090800@cschneid.com>

At 11:32 PM 10/22/2003 +0200, Christian Schneider wrote:
>Hello everybody,
>just joined the internals list (after being absent from php developers 
>lists for a while) so excuse my ignorance if any topic I bring up has been 
>discussed already. I checked the archives but couldn't find anything...
>
>Proposal: Allow dangling commas in function call parameters.
>Reasoning: We use some handy vararg tool functions and it's nice to be 
>able to write
>foo(
>         1,
>         2,
>         3,
>);
>since it's then easy to add a new parameter without having to add a comma 
>to the previous list.
>
>This would be symmetrical to the array() syntax. The patch for zend (php4 
>from cvs) would be minimal and I can't see any backwards-compatibility 
>issues right now (patch attached).
>
>Any opinions?

The only reason array() supports this is because there are some cases where 
people auto-generate initialization files which have a huge array() 
construct and it makes it slightly easier (don't have the last element 
problem).
In this case I don't see the same advantage and I see a disadvantage in 
readability and the possibility for PHP to give such an empty argument a 
meaning in future (although I doubt that'll happen).
So -1 from me.

Andi