Re: [RFC] Deprecations for PHP 8.6

Hi Am 2026-07-01 21:25, schrieb Seifeddine Gmati:

FWIW: I still have a rough draft to make array() (or rather: all non-object types) proper functions that effectively would “stand in” as cast operators. For array() specifically this would allow a named-argument style of defining arrays with “unquoted keys”: array(foo: 1, bar: 2).

This would require deprecating array() first anyway, no? Otherwise, dealing with it during parsing would be hacky (looking ahead at array(foo for : or => or , or ) to decide if it's an array or a function call, possible, but hacky think ).

It's not particularly pretty, but possible. The array() syntax will not actually be a function call, it will just look like one. Basically the : syntax can just parse into the same AST as the => syntax, the grammar just needs to make sure that they may not be mixed. The array() function will be made available in addition to support \array (i.e. with a fully-qualified name) and array(...) (i.e. a first class callable). My rough draft is in https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/18613, I think there are some issues still with properly compiling the array, because the AST node for => takes the two sides in different order compared to named arguments and I wanted to document the AST structure first (and then got distracted by more important things). Best regards Tim Düsterhus