4 ms·

Not since PHP8 it's not [0], it's a real part of the language that you can read and view using reflection [0] https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.attributes

• Nullabillity 3y ago
  It's still using a subset of the comment syntax, and will still be ignored as comments rather than hard-fail in earlier versions. Unknown attributes are also ignored silently, which isn't really a good sign.
  • tored 3y ago
    This is one of the reasons I like PHP, in newer PHP versions it is an attribute but in older versions it is just a comment. Clever and backwards compatible.
    • Nullabillity 3y ago
      It isn't backwards compatible (`#[foo` used to be legal PHP 7, but is illegal in PHP 8). It may technically be forwards compatible syntactically (`#[foo]` will, as you say, just be ignored by PHP 7), but that's an anti-feature (assuming that the attribute isn't a no-op, it'll presumably break something else).
      • tored 3y ago
        Okay, forward compatible. It makes it easier for framework and library maintainers to support multiple versions of PHP, which is nice. > `#[foo` used to be legal PHP 7, but is illegal in PHP 8). So it is not a comment in PHP8 then.