> Sorry to butt in, but a) the minimum PHP for WP is PHP 7.4
I got the 8.3 number from their official website:
https://wordpress.org/about/requirements/ , even if the requirement is
7.1, the `[]` syntax works fine there. So, this is not a problem.
> * Code accessibility - it is much quicker to determine whether something is a
> list or an array when visually scanning code when the keywords are being used.
`list(` does not mean a "list", PHP has no such type right now. It
means you are destructuring an array, `list("foo" => $bar)` is valid.
so "quicker to determine" is false, you can swap every `list(` usage
with `array(` and the behavior will be exactly the same.
> * Searchability of the code base - searching for `array(` or `list(` will
> yield useful results, searching for `[` will yield a hundred times more
> results, most of which are not what one is looking for (array access,
> assignments etc).
Yes, it would also yield `$typed->array(`, `$posts->list(`, and more.
If you are looking for a specific syntax, you should use AST based
search tools, not grep text. In which case, you can easily grep for
array construction using `[]` over writes/reads using array-access
syntax. This has never been a problem in every other language that
uses `[]` syntax.
> Other than that, they've brought up practical reasons for not switching to
> the new syntax in the past. Think along the lines of there being thousands of
> (often long-standing) open patches, which would need to be updated before
> they can be merged. The extra burden this would put on the limited amount of
> committers is another reason.
Again, i don't think the language should be held down because of a
single project when the migration path is available, and works for all
supported versions of that project, whether it's WordPress or any
other.
Cheers,
Seifeddine.
