Thiemos Archiv

PHP 5.4:

• traits.
• Short array syntax with [] square brackets instead of array().
• Closures finally support $this.
• ( new Class() )->method().
• function()[0].
• Binary numbers, e.g. 0b1000, just like in Java 7.
• register_globals and magic quotes are removed. Wow. This is incredible. A good thing, but still incredible when you realized these two features are the main reason PHP was created in the first place.

PHP 5.5:

• SELF is recognized in uppercase. I wonder why. They use SELF::CONSTANT as an example, but what's wrong with self::CONSTANT?
• These extremely weird logo GUIDs are finally killed, including php_logo_guid() and such.
• Generators. Use a function in a foreach loop, use yield in the function to return the elements for the loop. Magic.
• try-catch also supports finally. Wow, finally.
• One can use foreach ( $twoDimensionalArray as list ( $a, $b ) ).
• You can use functions in empty.
• "string"[0] and [1, 2, 3][0], obviously not very useful in production, but really nice when debugging and testing. Do not confuse this with $string[0], which is supported since basically forever.
• ::class returns the full qualified class name. Extremely useful in PHPUnit's getMock and setExpectedExpression.
• imageflip. Haha.

PS: I totally missed array_column() and boolval(). And array_replace(), but that was in PHP 5.3 already.