Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:85329
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain gmail.com designates 209.85.220.53 as permitted sender)
Message-ID: <550C8879.70002@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2015 13:52:09 -0700
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.5.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: internals@lists.php.net
References: <CAAn=CzWySWQU1D93WA7L2eHvd31zogekEHmDUOsN7P6kBK4VrA@mail.gmail.com> <550B5A81.1090706@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <550B5A81.1090706@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RFC - Array slice syntactic sugar
From: smalyshev@gmail.com (Stanislav Malyshev)

Hi!

>> My proposal is something similar to Pythons slice, in PHP this would look
>> like:
>>
>> $slided = $array[1:4]
>>
>> This will get the elements in positions 1,2,3,4. (1 through 4 inclusive),
>> ignoring the actual key of the array. The result for an array will be an
>> array with the keys preserved, in the same order.

I'm not sure how such operation would be useful, and it definitely would
not be intuitive, as $array[0] and $array[0:1] (assuming non-inclusive
semantic, or [0:0] with inclusive semantics) would return completely
different things. That would happen even if the array has only numeric
keys! This is the main problem with this syntax - unlike most languages
where it is used, PHP arrays are not vectors, they are ordered hashmaps.
Sometimes this is very convenient, sometimes - like for this syntax - it
is not. I think this is the major reason why such proposals failed in
the past.

-- 
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@gmail.com