Re: [RFC] Path to Saner Increment/Decrement operators

On 18 Jan 2023, at 12:22, G. P. B. <george.banyard@gmail.com> wrote: > [...] > I appreciate being shown concrete cases about the useful ness of this operation. > The reason I didn't go with adding support for decrementing alphanumeric > strings is that it was unanimously rejected. > However, if Rowan's suggestion of adding > string_increment()/string_decrement() with more rigorous behaviour (that we > can flesh out together) would be part of this proposal, would you be more > inclined to accept deprecating ++ from performing this feature? Hi George, I don't have a vote at the moment (I think I need one more RFC to pass)... but you might be able to convince me, I just like to know that breakages are really worth it, because my biggest issue is trying to get developers to upgrade their PHP installs (a lot are still on 7.4). I agree that some of the incrementing behaviour can be a bit weird, and I would be happy to see those be deprecated/removed; but I worry that the A, B, ..., Z, AA, AB, etc is something that works well today, and is likely to be tricky to find/replace with a new function in all existing code. At the moment I'd prefer Option 2 or 3, with the focus being on "tiding up the behaviour of the alphanumeric string to make it stricter and less error-prone." Craig