I love this thread. Who'da thunk alphabets could be so much fun? FWIW: Different language, different rules - to do 'letter math', letters must be converted to their ASCII number value, add one, convert back to a letter. The set of allowed ASCII numbers is limited to (I think) 256 and 'real' letters are a subset of that collection. Going from a-z was easy. Once you hit z, you reverted character 1 to a, then looped a-z for character 2, repeat as required.
There were only a couple of ways to evaluate a string's 'size'; alphabetical and length. Each comparison generated different results and one had to choose the comparison method based on the particular requirements. In order to convert a string to some numeric value, I believe I had to do it letter-by-letter and derive my own 'value' for the string which would be mostly useless. While the specific language methods differ from PHP (the language did not allow anything like 'a'++ so this particular discussion couldn't happen), it doesn't seem to me that the philosophical underpinnings are all that different - letters are special. They look and behave differently depending on the particular microscope you happen to be using. Anybody want to talk about rounding? ;-) Doug _______________________________________________________________________ This e-mail message has been sent by Kollsman, Inc. and is for the use of the intended recipients only. The message may contain privileged or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any use, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited, and you are requested to delete the e-mail and any attachments and notify the sender immediately. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
