JavaScript-style object literals in PHP

This is made possible by the introduction of closures in PHP 5.3 which I think was long overdue. However, in this specific case it's worth noting that many times in JavaScript objects declared like this<p><pre><code> var fido = {name: "Fido", barks: true}; </code></pre> are not actually used as objects but instead emulate a name-value container - and this is a piece of functionality that PHP already supports natively due to its array type. Of course it's nice that you can now assemble objects on the fly, but people coming from JavaScript should be reminded that it's not necessary to use PHP objects in this fashion most of the time.<p><i>Edit: it was PHP 5.3, not 5.2</i>

Greetings, author of the post here :)<p>This post was, of course, just a thought exercise. But if it sounds intriguing, please check Andrea Giamarchi's much more advanced "JavaScript Hypertext Preprocessor": <a href="http://webreflection.blogspot.com/2011/06/javascript-hypertext-preprocessor.html" rel="nofollow">http://webreflection.blogspot.com/2011/06/javascript-hyperte...</a><p>He has stuff like: $Object-&#62;prototype-&#62;toString-&#62;call($o); // [object Object]

They are introducing shorthand notation for arrays in PHP 5.4 using the [] syntax. For whatever crazy reason using {} notation hasnt been implemented for objects. I really wonder what the phpinternals team are doing sometimes.

Looks very similar to/almost the same of <a href="http://lucato.it/php-anonymous-objects" rel="nofollow">http://lucato.it/php-anonymous-objects</a>

And now people will think that PHP doesn't have classes.

Uh, eww. There's so much accidental complexity in those examples.<p>One would be better off using nodejs: JavaScript has far fewer terrible flaws than PHP.