Posted by Rami Elomaa on 05/31/07 13:56

Schraalhans Keukenmeester kirjoitti:

> Which makes me wonder why there's such a
> loose definition of the retval, and what is actually stored in it inside
> the func.

Perhaps in a future version of php they want to make it return some sort
of number to indicate how much they are different. Or maybe they find
out that returning -99999 is faster than -1... Perhaps in the future
strcmp('abc','abd') might return 1, because only one letter is
different, but strcmp('abc','xyz') would return something completely
different. If they keep the definition loose, they can improve the code
in the future, without breaking backwards compatibility. This means that
a script that now tests if(strcmp($foo,$bar)<0) works now for -1, but it
will also work for -42. It's all about reserving the possibility for
future improvements.

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