Re: Proposal: Render floats differently from integers in print_r()

Hi Tyson, I was taught in school that trailing zeros and the decimal point can be omitted when writing a number. It reads much better when you don't have to see all the zeroes following the decimal point. When humans write a number that has no digits after the decimal point they don't write the decimal point. print_r is designed to print the data in a human-readable format. There should be no information about the variable type. If you would like to see the data together with the type then you can use var_dump. If you want to see the data exactly as it is stored internally then use var_export. print_r is meant to display the data recursively in a friendly way. Adding the unnecessary decimal point is against that. On a technical note. print_r and print display data after casting it to a string. The way PHP is currently designed is that when you cast 1.0 to a string it becomes "1". Same with boolean TRUE. If you want to change the way that floats and booleans are represented as strings then you would have to change the way that the cast to string works. This would be a major change. Kind Regards, Kamil