[Nervetattoo]

Consistency in dereferencing is very important. empty() should at some point be deprecated, but fixing this erratic behavior for now is good imo.

The default value for method arguments is a shockingly bad idea for a new feature, it only supports the old, bashed upon, code quality that have been PHPs greatest legacy problem. If anything in this alley I'd like to see named arguments somehow.

I'm not so sure about property getter/setters as I find the syntax a bit awkward, all while magic methods lets you create getter/setter based APIs.

[davedx]

What's the deal with empty()? I've never used it myself but found people at the new place I work do use it.

[leftnode]

Like the article said, you can't use it with function calls because empty() itself is a construct of the language and not a function. So, empty(someFunc()) is an error. You'd have to put the return value of someFunc() in a variable and test it for emptiness, or do something like if (0 == strlen(someFunc())) { /* .. */ } which is overly verbose and not fast.