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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Syntactic improvement to array
From: cschneid@cschneid.com (Christian Schneider)

Richard Lynch wrote:
> So now we have an invisible operator with a magical symbol '[' which
> *sometimes* means create an array, but *sometimes* means to
> de-construct an array into individual variables?

The distinction you are making is from an implementation point of view. 
 From a language users point of view you're just dealing with arrays. 
Some people consider the distinction of the two a feature, some consider 
it a bug.

> That's just disgusting, imho.

To me it makes array usage more orthogonal and hence simpler, but that's 
obviously a matter of taste.

What's also beautiful about [] IMHO is the symmetry of the syntax, 
list() and array() are asymmetrical which I always found inferior.

>> - func('foo' => $foo, 'bar' => $bar, ...)   equivalent to
>> func(array('foo' => $foo, 'bar' => $bar, ...), see
>> http://cschneid.com/php/ for more info
> 
> Again, saving 5 characters just to confuse the hell out of idiots like
> me does not seem like a "win" for PHP. :-v

It is NOT about saving characters. If is about less clutter. The more 
important saving for us is the removal of an additional pair of parens 
which look like line-noise when nested. Funnily enough I forgot the 
closing parens of array() in my example above :-)

I agree that our function call syntax is somewhat magical as it 
automatically starts and stops the array-composition when encountering 
key => value pairs so I wasn't really expecting much love for this from 
the list. But one can dream :-)

Anyway, back to the main topic: I'm surprised how much hate a syntactic 
change like the one proposed by Andi still provokes nowadays when well 
established languages like C, C++, Javascript, Python and Ruby seem to 
successfully use [] or {} to construct arrays.

My personal summary of this thread is: We won't have syntactic sugar for 
common things like arrays, named parameter emulation and the like ever 
because it will be killed by the "we already have a way of doing this" 
and the "you cannot look it up" argument. Shame, that would be the tiny 
language development I'd personally benefit from.

Regards,
- Chris