Playing with the new PHP5.4 features

PHP5.4 it’s close and it’s time to start playing with the new cool features. I’ve created a new Virtual Machine to play with the new features available within PHP5.4. I wrote a post with the most exciting features (at least for me) when I saw the feature list in the alpha version. Now the Release Candidate is with us, so it’s the time of start playing with them. I also discover really cool features that I pass over in my first review

Let’s start:

Class member access on instantiation.

Cool!

class Human
{
    function __construct($name)
    {
        $this->name = $name;
    }
 
    public function hello()
    {
        return "Hi " . $this->name;
    }
}
 
// old style
$human = new Human("Gonzalo");
echo $human->hello();
 
// new cool style
echo (new Human("Gonzalo"))->hello();

Short array syntax Yeah!

$a = [1, 2, 3];
print_r($a);

Support for Class::{expr}() syntax

foreach ([new Human("Gonzalo"), new Human("Peter")] as $human) {
    echo $human->{'hello'}();
}

Indirect method call through array

$f = [new Human("Gonzalo"), 'hello'];
echo $f();

Callable typehint \

function hi(callable $f) {
    $f();
}
 
hi([new Human("Gonzalo"), 'hello']);

Traits

trait FlyMutant {
    public function fly() {
        return 'I can fly!';
    }
}
 
class Mutant extends Human {
    use FlyMutant;
}
 
$mutant = new Mutant("Storm");
echo $mutant->fly();

Array dereferencing support

function data() {
    return ['name' => 'Gonzalo', 'surname' => 'Ayuso'];
}
 
echo data()['name'];

IDEs don’t support (yet) those features. That’s means IDEs will mark those new features as syntax errors but I hope that they will support them soon. More info here

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