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Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2018 19:16:26 +0100
To: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Subject: Shorthand proposal for associative arrays
From: cschneid@cschneid.com (Christian Schneider)

Hi there,
I have a proposal for a shorthand notation of associative arrays =
borrowed from another language:
	:$foo
would be equivalent to
	'foo' =3D> $foo
and would work with array, list or []

Motivation behind it, maybe someone else finds more good uses:

1) Emulating named parameters with associative arrays like
	html::img([ 'src' =3D> $src, 'alt' =3D> $alt ]);
   could be written as
	html::img([ :$src, :$alt ]);
   which encourages consistent naming of variables and parameters

2) Simplifying list destructuring with non-integer keys, example taking =
from =
http://php.net/manual/en/migration71.new-features.php#migration71.new-feat=
ures.support-for-keys-in-list
	foreach ($data as ["id" =3D> $id, "name" =3D> $name]) {
   becomes
	foreach ($data as [ :$id, :$name ]) {
   which reduces redundancy.

I implemented a minimal patch (2 lines are added to the parser) to =
implement this which you can find at
	https://cschneid.com/php/php7_2/assoc_array_shorthand.patch

What do you think, is this worth an RFC? I hope I didn't miss an =
existing one :-)

Regards,
- Chris