Am Mittwoch, 5. Juni 2002 10:44 schrieb Ilker Cetinkaya:
> > Nice, but why not overload + for strings to do the
> > concatenation?
>
> i totally agree, overloading + for string concat is really
> desireable.
No, it is a nightmare.
PHP is a dynamically typed language, that is, the actual language
objects know their type, while object names (variable
identifiers) are untyped. Also, PHP automatically changes types
of language objects as needed.
Consequently, most developers do not know the actual type of
their variables (it is not seen anywhere unless you specifically
ask for it), and most of the time they don't actually care for
it. For example, when was the last time you noticed or even
cared that all arguments of your program (_GET, _POST, _COOKIE)
are actually string type, even if they are pure numeric strings?
Overloading + would suddenly require that developers care about
type, and would force them to write expressions like
$c = $a . $b;
as
$c = (string) $a + (string) $b;
just to make sure. Not actually an improvement.
This actually a deeper problem, as we have seen in the last few
discussions here on the list. PHP may remotely resemble C, C++
or even Java. It isn't. And it isn't intended to be.
If you treat it like any of these statically typed, compiled, and
far more traditional languages, you bleed. Big time.
Actually, I believe that Javascript has the programming and
execution model that comes closest to PHP of all the "C
lookalike" languages.
Kristian
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