PHP Internals News: Episode 94: Unwrap Reference After Foreach

Thursday, August 26th 2021, 09:22 BST

In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about the "First Class Callable Syntax" RFC.

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Transcript

Derick Rethans 0:14: Hi, I'm Derick. Welcome to PHP internals news, the podcast dedicated to explaining the latest developments in the PHP language. This is Episode 94. Today I'm talking with Nikita Popov about the unwrap reference after foreach RFC that he's proposing. Nikita, would you please introduce yourself?
Nikita Popov 0:33: Hi, Derick. I'm Nikita and I work at JetBrains on PHP core development.
Derick Rethans 0:38: So no changes compared to the last time.
Nikita Popov 0:41: Yes, at the time before that.
Derick Rethans 0:43: So what is the problem that is RFC is going to solve?
Nikita Popov 0:46: Well, it's really a very minor thing. I think it's a relatively well known problem for the more experienced PHP programmers. It's like a classic example, you have a foreach loop by reference. So foreach array as value by reference, and then you do a second loop after that, foreach array as value at the same it's by value. So without the reference sign. The result of that is that your last two array elements are going to be the same, which is kind of unexpected. If you're not familiar with how references in PHP work and scoping in PHP works. So I think it's worth explaining what's going on there.
Derick Rethans 1:27: Can you quickly explain the scoping or rather the lack of it, I suppose?
Nikita Popov 1:31: Yeah, it's really the lack of PHP really only has function scoping. So if you have a foreach array as value, then the value variable is going to stay alive, even after the foreach loop. And usually, that won't make much of a difference. So you will just have like reference to the last element of the array, might even be useful for some cases, you know, before we added the array, I think, array_key_last function. If the last element now is a reference, so if you have a reference to the last element, then you're write into that variable is also going to mo