I’m posting this to get some initial feedback on this idea before I officially submit an RFC.

Background

Even with PHP’s growing object-oriented and functional programming features, the callback remains widely-used and useful. However, forcing authors to create callbacks via strings and arrays presents difficulties:

1. Most IDEs do not recognize callbacks as such, and so cannot offer autocompletion, rename refactoring, and other benefits of code comprehension.
2. Authors can misspell identifiers inside strings.
3. Within namespaced code, authors can forget to prepend the namespace, since function calls within the namespace do not require it.
4. Where use statements change the identifier for a class, authors can specify the local classname instead of the fully resolved name.

Proposal Continue reading