Andreas Korthaus wrote:
Can someone tell me the reason for this decision?
Very few people converted to using {} so the argument about reading old code doesn't really hold. If you go and grep through all the public code out there, pretty much none of it uses {} for character offsets. And internally there is absolutely no difference between {} and []. Having two syntaxes for the same thing makes no sense, and getting rid of [] would break all sorts of stuff. The original reason for the {} was a technical one to simplify the parser, but the landscape has changed and that reason no longer exists.
As far a code readability and obviousness goes, I doubt anybody would guess their way to the $str{5} syntax. If you were new to PHP and you were going to try to guess how you would get a character offset in a string, what would your first guess be? Most non-PHP people I have asked have answered []. Removing the obvious syntax just doesn't make any sense. The other place {} is used outside of control blocks is in quoted strings where "{$foo{1}}" is much uglier than "{$foo[1]}".
-Rasmus -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
