On the Debuggable blog, Nate Abele has posted a request for opinions on a topic that's been lighting up the PHP mailing lists (and other social media) lately - the alternative array syntax for PHP.

Well, there's a patch available, but 2/3 of the active PHP committers (who participated in the vote) voted against its inclusion. However, of the end-users participating in the discussion, 17 out of 20 voted in favor. Shortly before the voting was concluded, there was a call for some user-land input, so I decided to humbly submit my two pennies.

His comments support the idea, noting that arrays are "our bread and butter" for the language and should be updated to make them even easier to use (and more in line with the declarations of other variable types).