you're assuming that cases don't exist where you won't reuse something. this is a false assumption, e.g. if all I wanted was the creation date of a file: stat("

you're assuming that cases don't exist where you won't reuse something. this is a false assumption, e.g. if all I wanted was the creation date of a file: stat("filepath")[7] is a reasonable way to do this in php, but you can't currently.