The BEST parts of PHP7

In this video we'll be learning about some of the coolest new features of PHP7, including static typing (sort of) and the spaceship operator.

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[howCode]

CORRECTION: At 3:18 I said "double equals", I should have said "double question mark". My bad! 🤭

[morphman]

I LOVE the spaceship operator!

In all other languages, and before 7, I had to do so many long methods to determine which value was bigger. It took at least 2 if statements, 3 if it was important to know if they were equally big, and then the return in it.

Now I can skip making the function all together and just ask straight where I would've called the function. With PHP's fancy questionmark operator, I don't even have to type out an if statement for it. It's all condensed down to:

return val1 <=> val2 ? val1 : equal : val2;

[morphman]

The double questionmark feature might benefit from another explanation:

It will set the value of the variable to be the first valid input. In the example in the video, $a was Null and therefore not a valid input.

You can do the same with strict typing now, so if you're asking for an int strictly and you put in $var = $a ?? -1, then $a must be an int (and not a string, array or anything else, though a float will work, but it will get truncated), otherwise $var will become -1.