dropping curly braces

+1 for keeping {} sintax in PHP6.

It's not fair for all those people who endeavoured to write a good PHP
code and followed the recommendations for it.
And why should this feature be removed while in the mean time PHP
developers are desparately keeping some very very old stuff for BC
reasons?
This is IMO an inconsistent behaviour.

So all of those who belived the "[] for string access is deprecated" line (or simply prefer the visual differentiation) and have 10s of thousands of lines of code with liberal use of $string{} are going to have to spend ages fixing that up?

Having two syntaxes for the same thing makes no sense,

I hear a lot of opinions here on the curly braces issue, and while I don't
use them, they're not in the way. I'd say let's keep them in.

As far a code readability and obviousness goes, I doubt anybody would
guess their way to the $str{5} syntax. If you were new to
PHP and you
were going to try to guess how you would get a character offset in a
string, what would your first guess be?

Well, it wouldn't be [] because I'd guess that's for array access as in
other
languages. I probably wouldn't guess at all, but look it up, and be very
happy to find it was {}. I remember being very, very surprised to find []
doing double duty, and glad that {} existed as an alternative.

You obviously have no C(++) experience. People with the C-background
consider strings to be arrays of characters, and therefor it makes perfect
sense to use [], just like it makes sense to use [] for strings in C.

I don't see a problem with {} however, and see no reason why it should be
removed. I don't find it disturbing when I have to read someone's code
containing {}, so why remove it and make a lot of people angry? I don't see
the improvement except that certain warm and fuzzy feeling...

Ron

Ford, Mike wrote on Friday, November 18, 2005 7:58 AM:

Andreas Korthaus wrote:

Can someone tell me the reason for this decision?

Very few people converted to using {} so the argument about reading old
code doesn't really hold. If you go and grep through all the public
code out there, pretty much none of it uses {} for character
offsets. And internally there is absolutely no difference between
{} and [].

And most public code still uses hacks for register_globals, is insecure and
poorly written.

So all of those who belived the "[] for string access is deprecated"
line (or simply prefer the visual differentiation) and have 10s of
thousands of lines of code with liberal use of $string{} are going to
have to spend ages fixing that up?

Sounds like they got us good! No more listening to documentation for us...

Having two syntaxes for the same thing makes no sense,

And neither does arbitrarily removing one syntax; especially when that
syntax has been the recommended way of referencing characters in strings for
years.

I don't buy this -- having two ways of doing certain things is one
feature that makes PHP so great -- it increases the user base who
find it easy to use, as they can pick the method that makes most
sense to them. I love the {} syntax, so let me use it. You don't --
fine, don't use it. (I won't convert to [] -- I'll go for
substr(..,..,1) instead). Another example: I hate proliferating {}
for control structures and use exclusively the if (): ... endif; form
-- fine, let me use it; your preference may be otherwise, but that's
fine too. In the end, each of us gets the PHP syntax we find easiest
to use, without denying the other his preference. What's so wrong
with that?

And with so much work to maintain backwards compatibility in the past, why
do we need this change now? While we're changing things, let's standardize
function parameter ordering.

As far a code readability and obviousness goes, I doubt anybody
would guess their way to the $str{5} syntax. If you were new to PHP and
you
were going to try to guess how you would get a character offset in a
string, what would your first guess be?

Well, it wouldn't be [] because I'd guess that's for array access as
in other languages. I probably wouldn't guess at all, but look it
up, and be very happy to find it was {}. I remember being very, very
surprised to find [] doing double duty, and glad that {} existed as
an alternative.

Yup - if anything, let's remove [] as string access - then again, if it
ain't broke, why try to fix it?

Hans Zaunere / President / New York PHP
www.nyphp.org / www.nyphp.com