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Not to mention a couple of other things I hate about PHP arrays:

1) They don't extend stdClass so they aren't technically objects-- they're a different data type completely (WTF?) 2) Arrays are passed by value and not reference by default. Double WTF. So passing an array to a method call without the & reference operator is inefficient and prone to bugs as noobs don't expect the immutable behavior.

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I could be wrong about the inefficiency, maybe arrays in PHP are implemented as "copy on write". But seeing how PHP is such a mess of a language, I somehow doubt it...

They ARE implemented as COW. It's discouraged to use explicit reference passing if you don't want to alter the array as PHP has to do a slight bit more work if you pass a reference.

I think copy on write was added in the 5.1 timeframe (around 2005)

Thanks for the info. I do think the default should have been pass by reference though, like with objects since PHP5.

Arrays (and everything else) should be objects. That would also solve the pass-by-reference issue and would clean up the global namespace that's littered with array_* functions.

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