Antony Dovgal wrote: ...

I didn't realize there was a section of the code flagged 'syntactic sugar' and only a few people maintained that part. it also seems ridiculous to debate a syntax *addition* such as this in terms of maintainability. Is it really is hard to maintain this patch to the parser? How hard is it to maintain this:

$array[] = $foo;

...vs any other part of the codebase?

I think a lot of web developers who use PHP would agree with Rasmus' sentiment[1]:

"What is clear and understandable to web developers is a moving target. As someone mentioned, nobody who does any sort of web development today can ignore Javascript and they will typically be switching back and forth between Javascript and PHP every couple of minutes. This is our target user these days and as such this syntax is appropriate I think."

[1] http://marc.info/?l=php-internals&m=117060700805108&w=2

Jeff