Re: [PATCH] [RFC] Closures and lambda functions in PHP

> I think allowing globals/lexicals to be passed by value doesn't make > much sense, you could just use a regular parameter for that. No, that is highly inconvenient when you're doing actual functional programming with higher order functions and everything. $i = 1; $incrementor = lambda ($x) lexical ($i) { return $x + $i; } .. $arr = array_map($incrementor,$arr); How would you do this by passing in $i as a parameter without a closure? And if you use references, this may break if $i is a loop variable (the canonical example of closure-WTF). > And that would bring another inconsistency to PHP, and would mean that PHP > is discouraging the use of $_GLOBALS, that was created to discourage to use > of 'global $var'. All languages accumulate cruft as they evolve. global behaves in a manner that is inconsistent with pretty much everything else in PHP (referencing by default), and variables can be declared global in the middle of a function, which makes no sense at all. It would be a mistake to be consistent with something so badly broken. By "long term replacement for global" I meant to imply that it would actually be a good idea to remove the old global keyword from the language. Deprecate it in PHP 6 and kill it in PHP 7, or maybe in PHP 7 and 8. Cruft gone. $GLOBALS should be kept around because it is not a reference and allows acutally unset()ing a global variable, for example. Gesundheit Wag -- Da saß ich nun, führte Krieg und hatte Geburtstag. - Joschka Fischer