RE: [PHP-DEV] Introducing "Array Of" RFC

Am I the only one who finds both proposed syntaxes somewhat confusing? The originally proposed 'Bar[]' simply looks strange. HHVM's introduces even more "special characters" (<, >, ?) to parse, looks a bit like a regular expression and it was even already mentioned that it's "imported" from C++ ... PHP is not C++, and why should it be? So, how about this: Array[Bar] $a - $a is array containing only instances of Bar Array[Bar|null] $a - $a is array containing Bar instances or nulls Array[Bar] $a = null - $a is either null or array containing only instances of Bar Array[Bar|null] $a = null - above, but the array can contain nulls It's easily readable and everybody should be able to recognize what this thing does even without prior knowledge. Hell, why not Array[Foo|Bar|stdClass|whocares] ? Or even (at a later stage): Array[]["key1", "key2"] ... which would hint for a numeric index array containing associative arrays that in turn must have the defined keys. This is indeed a bit crazy, but possible to add in the future without BC breaks. You could even shove scalar typehints in there as soon as they are implemented. Cheers. Andrey.