2006/6/4, Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
Martin Alterisio wrote: > Still: > anything < ++anything > should be true, or at least that's what they taught me on abstract data > types design, and I think they're right (at least this time) In loosely typed languages that is not always true. Operators have to guess at the type and try to do what the user expects. There will always be edge cases. Being able to increment strings is pretty handy when you need to create sequences for unique file and directory names. For example, this also works: $filename = "file1"; $filename++; echo $filename; You would get "file2" from this. Think about the amount of code you would need to write in C to make that work? Then change $filename to "fileA" and increment it. And you get "fileB". When we get to "fileZ" we don't want to go off into unprintable character land, we want to try to stick with the pattern. -Rasmus
I still don't see why this functionality should be a native operator of the language. It doesn't seem natural that ++ operator "understands" that the string could be an enumeration of some kind. I believe that such things should be left to the coder who knows what the string is really representing, not to the language.
