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Well, yeah, I agree that the SPL types are nice to have. My complaint is that PHP's only first-class array type is a weird array/map combo. Have you ever seen a

• Elv13 12y ago
  Lua also have hybrid array, maps and object. It does work well when implemented in a sane way. Lua has different way of iterating the table if you want an array or maps.
  • stdbrouw 12y ago
    ... though I wouldn't necessarily call Lua's way of doing things "sane". E.g. if Lua encounters a `nil` somewhere in your table, it will stop iterating.
    • joeyo 12y ago
      It's certainly sane in the sense that it was an intentional, if perhaps unusual, design decision. I personally like it since it results in an efficient implementation of sparse arrays. In any event, Lua 5.2 will respect the __len, __pairs and __ipairs metamethods, so you can tweak this behavior if you need to store nils in your tables and iterate over them.
      • stdbrouw 12y ago
        The world would be a beautiful place if everything intentional were sane :-) It's bitten me a couple of times (e.g. when unpacking arguments in a function to feed them to another function, where one of the arguments is nil) but I can see how it could be the desired behavior in some cases.
• brazzy 12y ago
  > My complaint is that PHP's only first-class array type is a weird array/map combo. Have you ever seen anything like that in another language? Um, Javascript?
  • shimonamit 12y ago
    Javascript's arrays cannot be used as maps or associative arrays. Arrays require numeric, consecutive keys. Otherwise it's an Object. -- Clarification edit: Creating a new key on an array using arr['key']=1 creates a property on the arr Object but does not add an element to the standard array. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8630471/strings-as-keys-of-array-in-javascript http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8630471/strings-as-keys-o...
    • mc808 12y ago
      Arrays are always objects in JavaScript, and they can be extended like any other object or used as maps (barring key conflicts).
    • dsp1234 12y ago
      Adding non-numeric keys does not remove an Array's "arrayness" in JavaScript var x = []; console.log(Object.prototype.toString.call(x)); //[object Array] x[0] = 1; console.log(x[0]); //1 x["test"] = 2; console.log(x["test"]); //2 console.log(Object.prototype.toString.call(x)); //[object Array] x.map //function map() { [native code] } var y = {}; console.log(Object.prototype.toString.call(y)); //[object Object] y.map //undefined
      • the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
        It does internally. Pretty sure that's even defined in the standard.
        • cgrand-net 12y ago
          If you can't observe a difference, does it matter?