Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language.

Hello, this is Episode 69. Today I'm talking with Larry Garfield, about an RFC that he's just announced called short functions. Hello Larry, would you please introduce yourself?

Hello World, I'm Larry Garfield, the director of developer experience at platform.sh. These days, you may know me in the PHP world mainly from my work with PHP FIG. The recent book on functional programming in PHP. And I've gotten more involved in internals in the last several months which is why we're here.

I'm pretty sure we'll get back to functional programming in a moment, and your book that you've written about it. But first let's talk about short functions, what are short functions, what is the problem that are trying to solve?

Well that starts with the book actually. Oh. Earlier this year, I published a book called Thinking functionally in PHP, on functional programming in PHP, during which I do write a lot of functional code, you know, that kind of goes with the territory. And one of the things I found was that the syntax for short functions, or arrow function, or can be short lambdas, or arrow functions, you know whatever name you want to give them, was really nice for functions where the whole function is just one expression. Which when you're doing functional code is really really common. And it was kind of annoying to have to write the long version with curly braces in PSR 2, PSR 12 format for functions that I wanted to have a name, but we're really just one line anyway does return, blah blah blah. It worked, got the job done.

Then hanging around with internals people, friend of the pod Nikita Popov mentioned that it should be really easy. Now that we've got short functions, or short lambdas, do the same thing for named functions. And I thought about. Yeah, that should be doable just in the lexer, which means, even I might be able to pull it off given my paltry miniscule knowledge of PHP internals. So, I took a stab at it and it turned out to be pretty easy. Short functions are just a more compact syntax for writing functions or methods, where the whole thing is just returning an expression.

Just a single expression?

Yes. If your function is returning two parameters multiplied together, it's a trivial case but you often have functions or methods that are doing. Just one expression and then returning the value. It's a shorter way of writing that. Mirrored on the syntax that short lambdas use. It doesn't enable you to really do anything new, it just lets you write things in a more compact fashion. But the advantage I see is not just less typing. It lets you think about functions in a more expression type way, that this function is simply a map from input to this expression, which is a mindset shift. So yes it's less typing but it's also I can think about my problem as simply an expression translatio