Hi,

No one said it's a matter of life and death. But is it only a matter of life and death improvements that should be considered for PHP?

The typical use case that benefits most from this is when a function accepts arrays as a means of structured/named/nested options, something I use a lot.

Compare verbosity and readability:

quoteInto('SELECT * FROM Table WHERE x > ? and y < ?', array(10, 50)); vs: quoteInto('SELECT * FROM Table WHERE x > ? and y < ?', [10, 50]);

renderSomething(array('exclude' => array('a', 'b', 'c'), 'include' => array('d', 'e', 'f'))); vs: renderSomething(['exclude' => ['a', 'b', 'c'], 'include' => ['d', 'e', 'f']]); or even vs: renderSomething(['exclude' : ['a', 'b', 'c'], 'include' : ['d', 'e', 'f']]);

The key thing is, no one is requesting that array() be removed. Just that an obvious and commonly used shortcut is added. It's not confusing, it's not hard, JavaScript also has BOTH short and long syntax for arrays and objects:

var array = new Array(); -- same as -- var array = []; var object = new Object(); -- same as -- var object = {};

And when people have both of those, guess which one they use in more than 90% of the cases.

Regards, Stan Vassilev