On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 12:42 PM Marcos Passos <marcospassos....@gmail.com> wrote: > > Whenever you look for more information about the maximum size of an array, > you find someone saying that "PHP arrays do not have a maximum size, but > the amount of memory available". However, I could not find any excerpt in > PHP documentation that supports that. > > Even if the engine imposes no hard limit on the size of an array, in fact, > there an inherent limit that is assumed by some functions, and that is what > I would like to suggest making explicit on the documentation. The lack of > this definition leads to inconsistencies and leaves several open questions, > including: > > - If no limit exists, then it's conceptually possible to have an array > with *PHP_INT_MAX + 1* elements. In that sense, what would be the return > of the *\count()*? > - The function *range* validates the size of the resulting range against > the maximum size of the hash table (defined internally as *HT_MAX_SIZE*), > and throw an error if it exceeds that value. Is that the limit? > - he function *array_fill*, in contrast, does not rely on *HT_MAX_SIZE* > for validating the size of the result. But, why? > - The documentation says that omitting the third parameter of > array_split is equivalent to \count($array). If the maximum number > representable in PHP is *PHP_INT_MAX*, is the max size the same as > *PHP_INT_MAX*? > > There are other examples, but I think these are enough to make the point. > > My understanding is that the conceptual limit is *PHP_INT_MAX*, as there is > no way to represent the size above this value. If so, the interval that > represents all possibles indexes for an array is defined as *0 <= index <= > PHP_INT_MAX -1*. That definition aligns with all functions that support > negative length as *-PHP_INT_MAX* is equivalent to the start of the array. > > Could you guys please share your thoughts on this topic?
-- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
