Ah yes, I love nothing more than functions on the left side of assignment. Edit:...

abarrett · on July 24, 2011

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.list.php

It's a language construct, not a function.

wvenable · on July 24, 2011

It's a pretty common feature of a lot of languages (Python, Perl, etc) so it's really not that irregular.

jrockway · on July 24, 2011

It looks more obviously "language feature" in Perl, Python, and JavaScript, though:

   my ($foo, $bar) = f;
   (foo, bar)      = f()
   var [foo, bar]  = f();

wvenable · on July 25, 2011

How are any of those examples significantly different from:

   list($foo, $bar) = f();

Given that PHP uses the array() keyword for constructing arrays, it is perfectly symmetrical. My IDE highlights the list() keyword just the same as all the other keywords.

masklinn · on July 24, 2011

`list` is a special form, not a function.