PHP RFC: Comprehensions

Another interesting RFC recently landed to PHP community. So far the easiest way of explaining comprehensions for me comes from Python world:

Comprehensions are constructs that allow sequences to be built from other sequences.

Here’re some examples from List comprehensions in Python:

def palindromes(strings):
    return [s + s[::-1] for s in strings]

def starting_with(letter, names):
    return [name for name in names if name[0].lower() == letter.lower()]

JavaScript, however, decided to remove its support from standard in favour of filter/arrow/map functions.

The array comprehensions syntax is non-standard and removed starting with Firefox 58. For future-facing usages, consider using Array.prototype.map, Array.prototype.filter, arrow functions, and spread syntax.

MDN

Speaking of PHP RFC, that’s what we might get if RFC gets approved:

$gen = [for $list as $x if $x % 2 yield $x*2];

//equivalent to:

$gen = (function() use ($list) {
  foreach ($list as $x) {
    If ($x % 2) {
    yield $x * 2;
    }
  }
})();

Personally, I would vote in favour of this. Maybe, it’s nostalgia about Perl one-liners and how elegant you can solve some basic stuff. I think PHP needs this syntactic sugar, giving people choice of using closure calls and comprehensions.