I have no idea what about this you think would be 'elegant'. It's elegant in the same way that using computed offsets into raw memory is elegant in C, which is

I have no idea what about this you think would be 'elegant'. It's elegant in the same way that using computed offsets into raw memory is elegant in C, which is to say that it's inherently fragile, prone to very subtle bugs, and detrimental to readability. And given that it's in PHP, it doesn't even really have the absurd machismo of doing dubious things with pointer arithmetic in C going for it.