Re: [RFC] Spread Operator in Array Expression v0.2

On Thu, 4 Apr 2019 at 17:14, Derick Rethans <derick@php.net> wrote: > Could you add to the RFC what the exact pain point is that this is > trying to address? It looks a little like this is just adding syntax for > the sake of it. > Not everything is about pain, some things are just about gain. ;) The link Levi shared about Dart included some interesting examples of where spreads are useful, some of which you can probably imagine happening in PHP: https://medium.com/dartlang/making-dart-a-better-language-for-ui-f1ccaf9f546c It also takes us a step closer to having a short-hand for iterator_to_array, in the shape of [...$iterator]. On its own, that's still pretty ugly, but it's not hard to come up with cases where it would be a lot nicer, like concatenating two iterators: // Before array_merge(iterator_to_array($iter1), iterator_to_array($iter2)) // Or to generalise to all iterables array_merge( is_array($iter1) ? $iter1 : iterator_to_array($iter1), is_array($iter2) ? $iter2 : iterator_to_array($iter2) ) // After (handles both cases) [ ...$iter1, ...$iter2 ] Granted, I can't point to a real-life example of that, but it shows that this isn't just new syntax for something that's already easy. Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]