> Making such a distinction is exactly what PHP got wrong here, ie. the parser should allow any expression to be called as a function, including other function

> Making such a distinction is exactly what PHP got wrong here, ie. the parser should allow any expression to be called as a function, including other function calls and property lookups. I didn't imply that I would have done it the same way they did! I merely expressed the feeling that the parser might be implemented in a way that makes this hard to fix without an extensive rewrite. From the parser's perspective this might be an edge case. Admittedly, you know more about PHP internals than I do, but I assumed there would be hurdles in there - otherwise this should have been done years ago. Especially since I expect there is no compatibility downside in making these cases work. Working with PHP I got the same impression as you did, namely that the parser makes certain assumptions about the code structure that causes the result to be more rigid. I agree that ideally the parser should just be agnostic about stuff it can't meaningfully reason about.