Hi internals! I want to discuss some details of the new dereferencing syntaxes which were introduced in 5.4.
1. I already mentioned lack of support for dereferencing using the alternative array syntax earlier (http://markmail.org/thread/j6rs3bzgzhxmco7n) but there was no conclusion on that topic. Now the (new A)[0] dereferencing syntax landed without alternative syntax too. Does this mean that the general consensus is to deprecate and remove the {} syntax altogether in the future? 2. PHP always supported doing $arr[0]() and 5.4 added the reverse func()[0]. The addition seems slightly inconsistent though, as the combination of both does not work: func()[0]() will result in a syntax error. Same applies to method array dereferencing. Is this intentional? 3. The new expression method, property and array dereferencing syntaxes were added in expr_without_variable. I am not sure whether this was intentional or not. That way (new A)->b will not be a variable (in the parser sense), whereas $a->b will. What is the impact of this? One thing that will not work is doing (new A)->b = 'c'. I know, this looks fairly stupid, but if you consider that A might overload the __set operation it might actually make sense. (It won't make much sense, but hey, (new A)[0] doesn't make much sense to me either). Other areas that might be affected are return by reference, pass by reference and iterate by reference (but I didn't test this). So, I know, those are all edge cases, so leaving them as is won't hurt much. Still I think it's better to discuss them ;) Nikita -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
