Re: Re: Syntactic improvement to array

Richard Lynch wrote:

So now we have an invisible operator with a magical symbol '[' which *sometimes* means create an array, but *sometimes* means to de-construct an array into individual variables?

The distinction you are making is from an implementation point of view. From a language users point of view you're just dealing with arrays. Some people consider the distinction of the two a feature, some consider it a bug.

That's just disgusting, imho.

To me it makes array usage more orthogonal and hence simpler, but that's obviously a matter of taste. What's also beautiful about [] IMHO is the symmetry of the syntax, list() and array() are asymmetrical which I always found inferior.

- func('foo' => $foo, 'bar' => $bar, ...) equivalent to func(array('foo' => $foo, 'bar' => $bar, ...), see http://cschneid.com/php/ for more info

Again, saving 5 characters just to confuse the hell out of idiots like me does not seem like a "win" for PHP. :-v

It is NOT about saving characters. If is about less clutter. The more important saving for us is the removal of an additional pair of parens which look like line-noise when nested. Funnily enough I forgot the closing parens of array() in my example above :-) I agree that our function call syntax is somewhat magical as it automatically starts and stops the array-composition when encountering key => value pairs so I wasn't really expecting much love for this from the list. But one can dream :-) Anyway, back to the main topic: I'm surprised how much hate a syntactic change like the one proposed by Andi still provokes nowadays when well established languages like C, C++, Javascript, Python and Ruby seem to successfully use [] or {} to construct arrays. My personal summary of this thread is: We won't have syntactic sugar for common things like arrays, named parameter emulation and the like ever because it will be killed by the "we already have a way of doing this" and the "you cannot look it up" argument. Shame, that would be the tiny language development I'd personally benefit from. Regards, - Chris