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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Support negative indexes for arrays and strings
From: smalyshev@sugarcrm.com (Stas Malyshev)

Hi!

> Stanislav I though that the discussion on adding this type of functionality to 
> strings was already a done deal? Despite the obvious problems it introduces.

I'm not sure what you mean by "done deal". There was this RFC:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/strncmpnegativelen
but that wasn't implemented due to some objections. There's also a pull
about negative strings offset but no RFC and no vote was ever held on it.

> I've already pointed out why there is no way that this can be discussed in 
> connection with 'collection arrays' and so there does need to be a clean break 
> between the two for ANY discussion. I believe that PHP is the only language that 
> allows us to use -ve indices ( i.e. keys ) in arrays? That was one of the nice 

Depending what you mean by "arrays". I'm sure any language that has maps
indexed by value would not exclude values equaling to negative numbers.
E.g. in python:

>>> a = {}
>>> a[-2] = 1
>>> a
{-2: 1}

I'm not sure we need or can do anything else for arrays. We maybe could
for strings, technically, though I'm not currently convinced that having
substr() we really need to. But if the vote goes other way, for strings
I think it may be OK, if we figure out what to do with out-of-the-string
offsets.
-- 
Stanislav Malyshev, Software Architect
SugarCRM: http://www.sugarcrm.com/
(408)454-6900 ext. 227