It seems to me that if you truly want to clean up this specific part of the language, you are going to have to play the long game: 1. New functions are added for the perl behavior of string increment and decrement. No warnings are given in code, but call-outs are made in upgrading and other documentation about this behavior changing. Note that in the past I would have used an E_STRICT for this, but people seem opposed to adding new E_STRICT warnings. 2. In the next minor version, we add a warning about the behavior when string increment/decrement is used. 3. In the next major version, we finally clean up the behavior.
But this gets muddy if we do PHP 8.3 for step 1, and then we decide to go for PHP 9.0 instead of 8.4, and it messes with the "ideal" cycle. Note that I support this sort of plan, and would support it for cleaning up many other parts of PHP as well. It's just unfortunate it takes so long, but that's how it goes sometimes :/ -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: https://www.php.net/unsub.php
