Re: dropping curly braces

Is there anything wrong with having a convention for character access of strings? Most PHP programmers see {} as string access and [] as array access - sure, they might be functionally identical, but its the convention which is important. Jevon > -------Original Message------- > From: Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com> > Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] dropping curly braces > Sent: 17 Nov '05 12:11 > > Andreas Korthaus wrote: > >> As far a code readability and obviousness goes, I doubt anybody would > >> guess their way to the $str{5} syntax. > > > > But you know without understanding of any context, that it's the 6th > > character of the string "$str". When you see $var[5], it could be the > > 6th character of a string, or an element of an array... and what about > > the value? You can't be sure that it's a string with length 1, it also > > could be another array, an object, a string with length 4711... > > > > That increases complexity and decreases readability. > > Your argument falls apart there. Try it: > > $a = array("ab","cd","ef"); > echo $a{2}; > > Guess what that prints? {} has nothing to do with strings. They are > 100% equivalent to [] and as such add nothing to clarity. > > -Rasmus > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > >