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To: Marc Bennewitz <php@mabe.berlin>
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Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 16:47:24 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Binary String Comparison
From: johannes@schlueters.de (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

On Mon, 2014-08-18 at 14:44 +0200, Marc Bennewitz wrote:
> The question isn't "What's wrong with ===, strcmp()?" but "What's wrong 
> with ==, <, >?".
> 
> We have a standard way to compare two operands but currently we do some 
> magic things to solve something that don't need to be solved.

Still it is a key property of the language which we can't simply change.
Also mind this: All input data are strings and some databases also
return data as string. So code like

   if ($_GET['id'] > 0)
or
   if ($db->fetchRow()[0] == 12)

which is common will break. Maybe using different sets of operators
would have been better, but that should have happened 20 years ago not
now.

Also mind consistency: If you change this you probably also have to
change other places where implicit conversion happens, i.e. array keys. 

In the end you get a complete new incompatible language and can throw
away most libraries and so on. 

So in case you have a Tardis, DeLorean with Flux Capacitor or any other
time machine I'm happy to support you in the past, but not this late.

johannes