Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

In that situation, Matlab allocates an array of length 3, fills it with “empty” values (depending on the type), and then sets the third element to the value. That’s what I’d have expected to happen here too...


Would you expect it to do that if somebody wrote the following?

    $id = 12835151;
    $arr[$id] = Get_thing_with_id( $id );


If $arr were an array I would, though I'd cringe at the wasted space (unless it were a sparse array).

Obviously, I'd agree that a map/associative array/dict/etc is a better choice here; I'm just annoyed about the name.


In my bog standard PHP I would do $thing = Get_thing_with_id( $id ); if(!empty($thing)){process($thing);}


yes.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: