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Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2013 11:02:20 +0100
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To: Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [PROPOSAL] Alphanumeric decrement
From: tyra3l@gmail.com (Ferenc Kovacs)

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On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 9:02 PM, Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me> wrote:

> Good evening,
>
> At present, it's possible to increment (++) an alphanumeric string, such
> that "a" when incremented becomes "b", "z" becomes "aa", and so on.
>
> However, it's irritated me that the same is not true for the decrement
> (--) operator. At present, "aa" when decremented stays as "aa", and "b"
> when decremented stays as "b". This lack of symettry is counterintuitive =
to
> me. I don't think it's what you would expect here.
>
> So I've written a patch which would change this. "aa" when decremented
> would be "z", and "b" when decremented would be "a". It also handles
> decrementing "a", which becomes "0". This creates an interesting new
> asymettry: {$a =3D "a"; $a--; $a++;} will result in $a being integer 1. I
> think it's better than the previous behaviour, though, which resulted in
> "b".
>
> The diff is here: https://github.com/TazeTSchnitzel/php-src/
> compare/php:PHP-5.6...AlphanumericDecrement
>
> My aim is to try and get this into PHP 5.6, if people are interested.
> Thoughts?
>
> --
> Andrea Faulds
> http://ajf.me/
>
> --
> PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List
> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
>
>
Hi,

While I agree that the current implementation is unintuitive, I would be
against changing it in a minor version.
In this thread multiple people mentioned that it would be ok to change the
alpha decrementing, because it wasn't working before and/or nobody would
use it as it isn't working currently.
I think you misuse the "not working" here. It works (as it doesn't throw an
error), but it behaves differently, what you would like/expect to see, and
we also have this behavior documented.
So changing the behavior in my opinion would be a BC break, and given the
nature of this feature, I think that there are no solution, which would
eliminate all the edge-cases and make the feature truly consistant/symetric
to the current incrementing and to our type juggling, so I think we can't
even call it a bugfix(and ship it in a minor), when we change it from
mostly-broken to slightly-broken.

--=20
Ferenc Kov=C3=A1cs
@Tyr43l - http://tyrael.hu

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