The Futuristic Advanced PHP - Part 2

In this series on What's New in PHP 7, we first discussed about major features of the latest PHP version 7+. And now in this second post, I will list down major improvements.

1. Arrays as constants

   define('APP_DIRS', array('app', 'incl', 'lib'));

2. Unicode codepoint Escape Syntax

   • Requires double-quoted string + escape syntax
   • "\u{ codepoint }"

3. Uniform variable syntax

   $name = 'car'; $car = array('name' => 'BMW', 'year' => 2014); echo $$name['name']; // PHP 5: Warning: Illegal string offset 'name' // PHP 7: BMW`

4. Grouped imports with use()

   require_once('constants.php'); require_once('database.php'); require_once('plurals.php'); // PHP 7`\ use App\Library\{Constants, Database as DB, Plurals}`