Re: [RFC] Deprecations for PHP 8.6

On Wed, 1 Jul 2026 at 19:36, Michael Morris <tendoaki@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On Mon, Jun 29, 2026 at 2:38 PM Seifeddine Gmati <azjezz@carthage..software> wrote: >> >> On Mon, 29 Jun 2026 at 18:52, Rowan Tommins [IMSoP] >> <imsop.php@rwec.co.uk> wrote: >> > >> > On 29/06/2026 17:37, Seifeddine Gmati wrote: >> > > Hello Internals, >> > > >> > > I have updated the RFC to include a deprecation proposal for the >> > > list() construct. >> > > >> > > ref: �A��SܝYa1ڔ >> > > M�https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecations_php_8_6#deprecate_the_list_construct >> > >> > >> > I don't think it makes sense to deprecate list() if we're not >> > deprecating array() - they're exact counterparts, and both replaced by >> > the [] syntax. Indeed, [] as a replacement for array() dates to PHP 5.4, >> > but as a replacement for list() was only added in PHP 7.1. >> >> I'm actually in favor of deprecating array() too, and >> I raised this >> on the #php-internals Discord channel. > > Hi Michael, > Are you crazy? Yes. > That would invalidate at least three quarters of the WordPress core code base and almost all of > it's plugins, not to mention THOUSANDS of tutorials on stack overflow. And whether you like it > or not about 40-60% of PHP sites use WordPress, depending on who you ask. The migration is running a single command: `ast-grep -p 'array($$$ARGS)' -r '[$$$ARGS]' --lang php -U` I dislike the idea that the langauge should not progress because people genuinely don't want to take 2 minutes to upgrade their codebase. I don't think the WordPress team would have trouble replacing array() with [] given that the minimum requirement for WordPress is PHP 8.3. Older WordPress installations don't have to upgrade because if they didn't bother upgrading WordPress, i doubt they will bother upgrading PHP :) > That would almost certainly cause that community to either refuse to upgrade, leading to the > problem the Python community faced with 2 & 3, or cause them to fork PHP. I don't think a single syntax change like array($x) to [$x] would cause the Python 2 to Python 3 chaos here, given that the "modern" syntax already works in older PHP versions. Cheers, Seifeddine.