For what it's worth, the Drupal assertion inspector calls these "Strict Arrays" since that's what they are - arrays in the true sense of the term found in all other languages. What PHP is calling an "array" is more accurately a "map" or "hash"
There is value in this validation - https://www.drupal.org/SA-CORE-2014-005 relied on the attacker providing an sql injection where the code was expecting numeric keys. There's no easy solution - this is just one of those things where PHP is painted into a corner by backwards compatibility. Calling them vectors just seems weird though. Calling them strict arrays at a language level has its own problems. On Thu, May 4, 2017 at 7:23 AM, Jesse Schalken <m...@jesseschalken.com> wrote: > On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 7:55 PM, Rowan Collins <rowan.coll...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > +1, I've been thinking of making a similar suggestion. We can bikeshed > the > > name (it should certainly start with "array_"), but I think there's a > very > > good case for having an optimised implementation built in, given the > > opportunities for short-cutting based on representation details. > > > > Something like array_is_vectorlike(), array_is_vector() or > array_is_sequential() sound good to me. You could also do the opposite, > array_is_assoc(). > > As an example use case, serialization formats often dynamically switch > > between an "array"/"vector"/"list", and a "hash"/"dictionary"/"table". I > > came upon this example recently: https://github.com/php-amqplib > > /php-amqplib/blob/master/PhpAmqpLib/Wire/AMQPAbstractCollection.php#L218 > > > Another reason this function would be of utility is that it would > discourage even more inefficient implementations that allocate new arrays, > like the one in that code ("array_keys($val) === range(0, count($val) - > 1)"), and nearly every single answer to this StackOverflow question (except > mine): > https://stackoverflow.com/questions/173400/how-to-check- > if-php-array-is-associative-or-sequential/ >
