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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

That's great news, finally we can do

  $a = [1, 2, 3];

and it also will make function calls with named parameters much more readable.

Sadly, it will be years before the majority of hosting providers adopt 5.4...

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Also arrays of arrays have a much more compact syntax:

  $a = [1 => [4, 5, 6], 2 => [7, 8, 9], 3 => [10, 11, 12]];

  $a = array(1 => array(4, 5, 6), 2 => array(7, 8, 9), 3 => array(10, 11, 12));

Uh, why wouldn't

  [[4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9], [10, 11, 12]]

work?

I know PHP has a weird history of rebelling against its C-family-syntax heritage, but requiring the syntax in your example would seem specifically calculated just to make developers' lives harder.

I think it might? http://svn.php.net/viewvc/php/php-src/branches/PHP_5_4/tests...

Well, arrays start with index 0, so if the indexes where 1 less it would be the same. Your example would be equivalent to

  [0 => [4, 5, 6], 1 => [7, 8, 9], 2 => [10, 11, 12]]

In addition, you only need to specify the first key to create a one-based array. Indexing will carry on from there.

    [1 => [4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9], [10, 11, 12]]

Your example would work, but there's a reason you might want different keys. My company's current web app is written in CakePHP, which has a love for arrays. Some of my queries look like this:

  $booking = $this->Booking->find('first', array('conditions' => array('Booking.booking_id' => $id), 'contain' => array('Review', 'Desk' => array('fields' =>
 array('provider_id', 'category_id'), 'Provider' => array('city', 'name'), 'ProviderCategory' => array('fields'   => array('provider_id', 'category_id'), 'DeskCategory' => 'name')))));

It's essentially not readable, but with [] it would work much better, and I still want to give keys to arrays.

As an FYI, you might want to look into custom find methods if you haven't already: https://github.com/josegonzalez/documentation/blob/master/03...

> Sadly, it will be years before the majority of hosting providers adopt 5.4...

With VPS hosting as low as $6/month, what reason is there to continue using shared hosting anyways?

Personally, I'm quite happy with VPS and would never go back to shared hosting without a good reason. But if you're writing software that is going to be used on lots of "standard hosting" packages you have to take this kind of delay into account.

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