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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Support negative indexes for arrays and strings
From: lester@lsces.co.uk (Lester Caine)

Stas Malyshev wrote:
>> 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.

And obviously no 'we are not going to do this' ...
It does get difficult at time to work out what IS still under discussion.
I think I'm getting confused with the extra indicies bits that were added at 
some point? Accessing array stored string content by character index ... god 
this is getting complicated!

>> >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 wonder if that was added because of the PHP methods?

> 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.

'Add an exception' ;)

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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