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You have obviously never worked on a million-line codebase.

When you have crap like this in your language:

> E.g., $i = 0; $a[$i] = $i++; makes a different array than $i = 0; $a[$i + 0] = $i++;

you have no hope of making a truly large program work. There are just too many sources of itsy bitsy bugs; you'll never find them all.

(I'm not a PHP user; I have no idea why those are different arrays. Don't bother explaining; I don't want to know.)

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I don't use PHP much, but I was curious, so here's the answer you don't want:

You get $a[1] = 0 the first way, and $a[0] = 0 the second way. PHP seems to evaluate the array index before the right hand side if there is something more than a $variable to evaluate; otherwise PHP evaluates the array index after the right hand side, after $i has been incremented.

I haven't used hiphop, but I'm curious if it preserves that disparity between arrays when translating to C++, or if it breaks PHP compatibility by making those two arrays equivalent.

The entire point of my post was that we preserve the semantics of this (and many other) PHP-isms. We have to, because you never can tell which glitches useful code has come to depend on.

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