Hi
Am 2025-05-21 16:27, schrieb Nicolas Grekas:
Thanks for sharing your insights. This looks a bit far reaching for the RFC.
Making array() a function / allowing named parameter syntax with array() would be a separate RFC.
On my side, my opinion is: don't make clone a function call. I've never
missed not being able to call clone as a callback. It's trivial to write a
short function using the operator when in need.
It's an intentional design goal of this RFC to borrow the function call syntax to avoid inventing something that does not yet exist in PHP and to avoid blocking additional keywords (“with”). Making clone() an actual function greatly simplifies the implementation, since all the heavy lifting around parameter parsing is already provided by the engine [1] and it also ensures that the behavior is consistent with the behavior implied by the used syntax. If the second parameter would be a regular array rather than using the named parameter syntax, making clone() a function would not be necessary (but wouldn't make things harder either).
Best regards
Tim Düsterhus
[1] As an example, with the currently proposed named parameter syntax, unpacking arbitrary Traversables with clone($obj, ...$traversable) would need to be reimplemented specifically for clone().