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Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2011 23:03:50 +0200
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To: Sean Coates <sean@seancoates.com>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Object and Array Literals
From: j.boggiano@seld.be (Jordi Boggiano)

Thanks for working on this.

On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 3:30 AM, Sean Coates <sean@seancoates.com> wrote:
> Please read, and if you have a comment that is not already covered in the=
 RFC, raise it here. I'm definitely open to discussion, but I would really =
love to keep this discussion civil.

TBH, I dropped half-way through the original topic, so I'm sorry if I
missed something, but why don't we just treat {"foo":"bar"} as an
array? json_decode() can do it, and it makes complete sense since PHP
arrays are hashes too. I don't see much benefit to having this create
an object by default, especially since even if you use that notation
to send data to a JSON API, json_encode'ing a hash will create an
object.

It's the only pain point I really have, that I can't use true
json-syntax without ending up with this messy pile of objects/arrays
mixed together. If we do this, IMO the hashes should not be able to be
defined with [], but that'll probably upset people, so I don't really
care if it is possible.

> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0=95 Strictness of unquoted keys.

This is just legacy crap honestly, if we make up new syntax, we
shouldn't include the old mess in it. I think everyone is quoting
their strings by now..

> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0=95 Support =3D> in addition to : as a key:value separator=
.

Same as my point on [] above, I think adopting the JSON notation
should be done fully, keeping this stuff in might be ok to make people
happy, but it does not make much sense.

> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0=95 possibility of simply not supporting the \u### syntax =
for Unicode characters in literal strings (just like the rest of PHP).

This is still PHP strings, they should behave as such. Sounds good to me.

> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0=95 Should mixed-format (numeric and associative arrays) b=
e allowed? (e.g. [1,'two':2, 3])

Assuming we keep [] to arrays and {} to hashes as I said above, I'd
say no. In the rare cases that it is useful you can still use array()
if you really feel this is necessary..

I'm sure many people will disagree with this, and I don't really mind
how it ends up syntactically speaking, but please really consider
dropping the stdClass part, that'd really suck :/

Cheers

--=20
Jordi Boggiano
@seldaek :: http://seld.be/