Re: Thousands Separator

On Friday, Jan 16, 2015 at 8:33 pm, Jennifer <jennifer@superiorshelving.com>, wrote: On Jan 16, 2015, at 11:51 AM, Jim Lucas wrote: > Could you explain the use of what you're describing/requesting? > > And how number_format would not work in its place. I'm talking about entering large numbers in the code. If I have a constant, e.g. $num = '123456789'; it would be nice to enter it as: $num = '123_456_789'; just to make it easier to read. As I mentioned, you can do that in Perl. The underscore takes the place of commas only for readability. It's not a deal breaker, but it sure would be nice! :) What you have proposed above is incredibly bad language design, but only because you’re not proposing what you think you are. Supporting automatic removal of underscores in the following is a reasonable feature: $num = 123_456_789; Doing the same in the following is not: $num = ‘123_456_789’; This implies that PHP will detect that the string contains a number with _s in place of thousands separators, and will ignore the _s. This is NOT a good idea and will lead to unintended consequences. The first example above says that PHP will accept and ignore _s in numeric literals, which is a very different proposition with no unintended side effects. Precision is very important when designing language features. -Stuart --  Stuart Dallas 3ft9 Ltd http://3ft9.com/