On: What's New in PHP 8.1

[AdrianB1]

I am not a developer, but I use PHP a lot for scripting and personal automation including small web apps with SQL backend. I found PHP 7 to be a great improvement over 5.x, but with 8 I skipped every single new thing they brought. I can use PHP 8.1 in PHP 7.4 compatibility mode, but I find the features in 8.1 making the language less readable and less logic; for example, 3 dots become part of the language syntax? What is next, emojis as operators? Secret gang hand shakes as functions?

[deergomoo → AdrianB1]

... was already syntax, for variadic parameters. Re-using it for unpacking makes perfect sense IMO.

[Sniffnoy → AdrianB1]

What's wrong with ellipsis as syntax? Plenty of languages have some sort of ellipsis (either 3 dots or 2) as syntax. See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis#Programming_languages and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_(computer_programming... . JavaScript/TypeScript also uses it in a similar way to PHP.

[FriedrichN → AdrianB1]

Fun fact: failure to implement unicode is the reason we never got a PHP6. So we're safe from emojis for at least a while.

[TazeTSchnitzel → FriedrichN]

PHP supports Unicode, just not in a Python 3-like way.