Proposal: Array syntax

I have read all the debate on this and found it very interesting. You
guys were generating comments faster than I could read them! lol.

I have used PHP constantly for 2 years. Most of that time has been
spent using arrays very extensively and often as function parameters.
For what my vote is worth, I strongly favor the newly suggested notation
(+1).

I'm not going to try to restate all the pros discussed and address all
the cons. I prefer not to have multiple ways to do things and I found
the list() function to be very counter-intuitive. I was thrilled when
foreach() came out and deprecated while(), list(), each() syntax.

Typing "array()" isn't very many more letters, that's true, but I type
it A LOT! lol. I sometimes use it as a parameter, and VERY often have
to use it to initialize variables before doing array_push() or setting
array items inside loops. Using: $a = []; would be wonderful and much
less clunky.

As far as extending the syntax to the list() command...well...I would
prefer to just find a way to deprecate it entirely, but that is probably
not possible. So I guess even though it would seem to make sense I
would have to vote against that because it SETS the values of its
"parameters".

Yes, it may be the way another language does it. All languages borrow
from others, as recent discussions regarding foreach() and {}
demonstrate.

I believe the ultimate goal of PHP is to have a "quick and dirty"
language that is easy to read, use, and learn. While Rasmus's comment
about no-magic made me stop and examine this for a while, I believe it
fits all those goals nicely and is an elegant reason to make an
exception to the no-magic rule.

No, I don't want to see stuff like:

if ([1][0] == 1) {

but as someone pointed out, you can make anything look nasty in C-syntax
derived languages.

--David

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David Enderson
Programmer
Digital IMS