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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 improveme

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?

FriedrichN 6y ago
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 6y ago
  PHP supports Unicode, just not in a Python 3-like way.
deergomoo 6y ago
... was already syntax, for variadic parameters. Re-using it for unpacking makes perfect sense IMO.
Sniffnoy 6y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis#Programming_languages and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_(computer_programming) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_(computer_programming... . JavaScript/TypeScript also uses it in a similar way to PHP.