Re: [VOTE] [RFC] Alphanumeric Decrement

On 21 January 2014 20:47, Lars Strojny <lars@strojny.net> wrote: > I would rather introduce a deprecation warning for decrementing (and > incrementing) alphanumeric strings. It’s just very bad behaviour and using > chr() and ord() is not that hard :) Agreed that the *current* behaviour is very bad and not hugely useful. Being able to increment and decrement "strings" is, however, often useful behaviour when dealing with binary data, and chr()/ord() can be expensive in this scenario. I would like to have something closer to C's behaviour, where (given that in PHP a string is essentially just a char*) I can access a character in a string by index (returns a string) and manipulate it arithmetically - so inc/dec would alter the byte value by 1, over the full range 0-255. If this were the case, I would expect an inc/dec operation on a string >1 character to apply the operation to the first character in the string, and operating on an empty string would produce an E_NOTICE. I would hate to see a deprecation warning issued now if it's possible the behaviour could be made more sensible in the future and "undeprecated". Obviously this kind of BC-break would be for a new major version, I'm not suggesting this is done immediately. For the record, this also sums up why I have voted "no" on the current RFC - I don't want to introduce more counter-intuitive behaviour when there is a much more intuitive (and useful) alternative. Thanks, Chris