After complaining about the tumultuous task of writing the keyword function over and over, I asked someone about an easier way. The person said that PHP is going to have arrow function syntax similar to es6.
const foo = (x, y) => {
return x + y;
};As I continued to look into this, I have not been able to find many examples online.
Can someone of the right caliber please expound upon this?
At this point, I am also really interested in how this would fit into the OOP aspect of PHP.
Original answer from February 2018:
This appears to be the syntax described in https://wiki.php.net/rfc/arrow_functions. It does have an experimental implementation.
In the arrow functions proposal, it is mentioned that it's an alternative to the "short closures" proposal, https://wiki.php.net/rfc/short_closures
As of February 2018, the current versions of PHP are 7.1.4 / 7.2.2.
I can't find any confirmation that either proposal has been approved. The former is in the "Under Discussion" state, the latter is "Declined / Withdrawn in favor of http://wiki.php.net/rfc/arrow_functions". I think it's too soon to know whether it will be adopted in any future version of PHP.
Update December 2019:
The feature has been released in PHP 7.4, according to https://www.php.net/manual/en/migration74.new-features.php
Arrow functions provide a shorthand syntax for defining functions with implicit by-value scope binding.
<?php $factor = 10; $nums = array_map(fn($n) => $n * $factor, [1, 2, 3, 4]);
But the usage has not been updated yet in the PHP manual page about Anonymous Functions
Here's a blog going into detail: https://stitcher.io/blog/short-closures-in-php