Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:62735
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: error (pb1.pair.com: domain pipeline.com from 209.86.89.64 cause and error)
DomainKey-Status: good
DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws;
  s=dk20050327; d=pipeline.com;
  b=SYwRG2+YgrQh4wsglaGwqrWnE50bCeEXFk5ddgWT8ADSef4SyaztjY/gFapQvH7z;
  h=Message-ID:Date:From:Reply-To:To:Subject:Cc:Mime-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding:X-Mailer:X-ELNK-Trace:X-Originating-IP;
Message-ID: <4477847.1346676078470.JavaMail.root@wamui-june.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2012 08:41:18 -0400 (EDT)
Reply-To: slevy1@pipeline.com
To: Jannik Zschiesche <hello@apfelbox.net>
Cc: internals@lists.php.net
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Support negative indexes for arrays and strings
From: slevy1@pipeline.com

>as I understood, a lot of people seem to have problems with this proposal, since arrays and strings could (and maybe >should) behave the same.

The terminology "negative indexing" seems to imply that the feature should work with arrays. To restrict it to just strings might involve creating a term one would only associate with strings.


>The main problem arises from the ambiguity for $array[-1] for arrays.
>But this is easily solvable: just introduce a slice operator.
>
>$array[:-1] and the ambiguity is gone.

Thanks for that suggestion!  On the one hand, negative indexing alone is simpler and less prone to typos, but it makes sense that using the slice operator would clarify the code. 

SL