[girvo]

> but only recently has PHP gotten around to supporting it

You're talking about the `[]` short-hand for arrays, right? That was released in version 5.4, in March 2012, I wouldn't really say that's "recent", at least in my opinion.

[krapp]

It is still relatively recent, if you consider how many older PHP installs are out there. I've had to write around this on a few projects, when I found out my client's server had no idea what the array shorthand or namespaces were.