Good evening everyone,
I have a simple suggestion for a feature addition, which I have already
implemented. Over 13 years ago, someone suggested adding support for
assigning by reference in list(), with the following syntax:
$arr = [1, 2]
list(&$a, $b) = $arr;
Which would be equivalent to:
$a = &$arr[0];
$b = $arr[2];
Their request is here: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=6768
It seemed like a useful feature, so I implemented it. The syntax is a
little unusual, in that normally you do $a = &$b, and with list() you'd
do list(&$a) = [$b], but I don't think there's a better syntax for it
that allows you to set some variables as references, but not all.
The patch is here:
https://github.com/TazeTSchnitzel/php-src/compare/ListByReference
If people think it is useful, I'll write an RFC soon.
Thanks,