Martin Alterisio wrote:
You're right about ++ operator not to be considered a math operator, my
mistake. What I should have said is that the usual connotation and expected
behaviour of ++ and the comparison operators is to give iteration
capabilities to a certain data type, as used in a for statement. For
that to
happen certain constrains must be true for these operators, one of them
being: any < ++any, which is not true for the way these operators behave in
php.
I'm not saying "It's wrong let's change it right away!", I completely agree
that these rules can be bent on a not strongly typed language. The point
I'm
trying to make, the thing I want to understant without a trace of doubt,
is:
is it really worthy the functionality supplied with the string ++ operator
as it is? I don't see its usefullness yet.
It has been in PHP from the very beginning. So 10+ years. In that time
it has been sparingly used, granted, but at the same time it really
hasn't gotten in the way and removing it would break a number of legacy
applications.
There were a lot more operators that worked on strings in the early
days. '*' would do a cross-product, for example, treating the two
string operands as vectors and returning a vector orthogonal to both of
these. But I got tired of trying to explain to people what a cross
product was and how strings mapped to vectors in Euclidean space and
removed that. You could also at one point do "abc"-"b" to get "ac".
-Rasmus
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