General behaviour of array changing funcs

Hi everyone, I encountered a problem today, which seems to be a well known "feature", but I didn't find _one_ comment of a responsible person on this by looking into the bug-database! The snippet <?php $bla = array( "5" => "green", "9" => "orange" ); var_dump( $bla ); array_shift( $bla ); var_dump( $bla ); ?> produces array(2) { [5]=> string(5) "green" [9]=> string(6) "orange" } array(1) { [0]=> string(6) "orange" } The array_shift changes the integer-keys of the array. Likewise behaviour with array_pop and array_slice. Would anyone of the core-coders be so kind and give me a hopefully reasonable answer to this problem? I'm not very fond of this... Greetings Alexander -- | Alexander Wirtz | eMail: wirtz@web-active.com | | web@ctive GmbH | WWW: http://www.web-active.com |