I couldn't believe he didn't conclude the article talking about Google's Go It's remarkably close to what he wants. You can currently ignore a return value by

I couldn't believe he didn't conclude the article talking about Google's Go It's remarkably close to what he wants. You can currently ignore a return value by assigning it to _ -- all that is needed for his proposal is another token that causes the program to halt if it is assigned non-zero. If they ever allow overloading assignment you could do it yourself! I don't think they'd spring for the semantics change of allowing assignment to fewer return values. And backslash as a destructuring operator? Seriously? That's a syntax hair-shirt even beyond PHP's use of it as the namespace operator.