Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:54044
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Message-ID: <81.7D.08769.49A542E4@pb1.pair.com>
To: internals@lists.php.net
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:08:39 -0500
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.18) Gecko/20110616 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.11
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: PHP array shorthand changes: splice?
From: justin.rovang@minnesota.edu (Justin Rovang)

I've sifted through the RFC for the array shorthand changes which are 
quite nice. Something I'm sure has been brought up, but possibly not 
recently: shorthand array splice. Has there been any notion to the 
introduction of this feature in the future?

The reason I bring this up is it seems that the proposed notation that 
uses a colon may eliminate, or complicate the introduction of this in 
the future.

Most languages that support this always start with the start index, and 
either specify the length of splice, or the last element to splice to.


e.g.:

$array = [0: 'PHP', 1: 'internals', 2: 'mailing list'];

/* Then a possible splice approach: */

$temp = $array[0 : 2];
$temp = $array[0, 2];


Now, this could be I simply don't know the behavior of the new syntax 
when used on top of an existing array, (Does $array[0=>'Test]; even do 
anything in terms of assignement?)