Johannes Schlüter

I was writing about new features in the upcoming PHP version (5.4, 6.0?) before. Today's topic reads like this in the NEWS file:

- Added array dereferencing support. (Felipe)

Now you might wonder what this typical short entry means. when doing OO-style PHP you might make use of a sntax feature which one might call "object dereferencing" which looks like this:

<?php
class Foo {
    public function bar() { }
}

function func() {
    return new Foo();
}

func()->bar();
?>

So one can chain method calls or property access. Now for a long time people requested the same thing for array offset access. This was often rejected due to uncertainties about memory issues, as we don't like memory leaks. But after proper evaluation Felipe committed the patch which allows you to do things like

<?php
function foo() {
    return array(1, 2, 3);
}
echo foo()[2]; // prints 3
?>

Of course this also works with closures:

<?php
$func = function() { return array('a', 'b', 'c'); };
echo $func()[0]; // prints a
?>

And even though the following example is stupid I might accept this feature as one of the few places where it is ok to use references in PHP:

<?php
$data = array('me', 'myself', 'you');
function &get_data() {
    return $GLOBALS['data'];
}
get_data()[2] = 'I'; // $data will now contain 'me', 'myself' and 'I'
?>

Wonderful, isn't it? If you want to test it please take a look at the recent snapshots for PHP trunk and send us your feedback! Please mind that all features in PHP trunk may or may not appear in the next major PHP release.

One more thing out of the category "Java annoys me": In Java you can declare an array like that:

String[] array_of_strings = { "foo", "bar", "baz" };

but you can't do that inside a func call

someMethod({ "foo", "bar", "baz" });

not even when using an explicit cast

someMethod((String[]){ "foo", "bar", "baz" });

A smart compiler should be able to create the same code for both, I agree this can be unreadable, but that should be my choice not the language's choice.</flame>