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There is a heated debate on PHP internals list -- this in itself is not news, the list should be called "php heated debate list" btw. -- about short array syntax. What I will write here is probably know to the Drupal readers -- less known to the PHP internals list, I guess. So, I am the form API maintainer of Drupal, which probably is the most complex array based API in existence. I support the $b = ['foo' => 'orange', 'bar' => 'apple', 'baz' => 'lemon']; wholeheartedly. I less like $b = ['foo': 'orange', 'bar': 'apple', 'baz': 'lemon']; but I guess we could be friends with this one too :) Also, could we get named parameters and closures? Please?
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My immediate reaction upon seeing this is that the double arrow syntax is more traditionally like PHP and Ruby, while the colon syntax is more like Python and JavaScript.
PHP: $b = array('foo' => 'orange', 'bar' => 'apple', 'baz' => 'lemon') # Makes an associated array
Ruby: b = {'foo' => 'orange', 'bar' => 'apple', 'baz' => 'lemon'} # Makes a hash
Python: b = {'foo': 'orange', 'bar': 'apple', 'baz': 'lemon'} # Makes a dictionary
JavaScript: var b = {'foo': 'orange', 'bar': 'apple', 'baz': 'lemon'}; // Makes an object
Funny how the four languages all have different names for this.