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To: Benjamin Eberlei <kontakt@beberlei.de>,
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Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2020 15:33:38 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [VOTE] Shorter Attribute Syntax Change
From: a.leathley@gmx.net (Andreas Leathley)

On 10.08.20 15:08, Benjamin Eberlei wrote:
> () does not count as ending symbol, because it is not required, as
> such its
> not an ending symbol.
>
> The point Andreas Leathley makes in the discussion thread about new Foo =
not
> having an end symbol demonstrates exactly the opposite point he was tryi=
ng
> to make, because the new statement itself has to end with a semicolon:
>
> new Foo();
> new Foo;
>
> A statement has an ending symbol semicolon.

While I don't know the exact internal semantics of PHP, according to my
grasp of the language the new keyword does not need a semicolon at the
end - it can be part of any expression, like "new Foo(new Bar);".
According to the PHP manual
(https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.basic-syntax.instruction-separatio=
n.php)
instructions in PHP need to be terminated with a semicolon, while "new"
as a keyword has no special requirement about a starting or ending
delimiter.

The point I was trying to make was that new and attributes have the same
requirements in that they both need a class name and then optionally
arguments for the constructor to that class, so they are both narrow in
terms of what they do, attributes even more so than new, which reduces
the helpfulness of delimiters as you cannot define arbitrary
instructions in attributes - it always starts off with a class and then
any possibly more complex instructions will be in the arguments, and
those are enclosed by ().