Re: Re: [RFC] Numeric Literal Separator

On Wed, May 29, 2019 at 9:03 AM Côme Chilliet <come@opensides.be> wrote: > > My understanding from the RFC is that that the grouping is not > > relevant, the _ is stripped regardless. > > > > Am I wrong? > > No you’re not, the RFC allows grouping as the coder wants. > > Which is why I think it may cause problems because the way the > coder wants to group digits and the way easier for me to read is > not always the same. > > As Christoph M. Becker states there are already problems like this > with choice of names for variables and code style and such, but > until now numbers were a safe place that always looks the same. Numbers don't always look the same, though. They can already be written using hexadecimal, octal, decimal, binary, or exponential notation. Furthermore, as a workaround for the lack of numeric literal separators, some programmers end up writing numbers as complex expressions like 1 * 10**5 + 3 * 10**4 which can actually make them more difficult to read. > If people want to see big numbers broke up in groups of 3 I would > expect their IDE to do this on numbers for them. It isn't always desirable to group big numbers the same way, though. For example, a programmer may want to write 13500 as 135_00 or 13_500 depending on whether or not it represents a financial quantity stored as cents. > But I do get the point of the RFC for hexa and bit masks. Yes, this is another case where it can be useful to group by a varying number of digits depending on how a value is being used (e.g. nibbles, bytes, or words). So while it's conceivable that someone could use numeric literal separators to write a number in a less readable way, does this mean that the many good PHP developers shouldn't have the option to use this feature to improve readability? Sincerely, Theodore