Comment by tslocum

Based on the examples given in the blog post, this appears to be a massive step backwards for PHP. The language has been making an effort to clean itself up for years. The author claims that the temporary variable solution "feels icky". If we ultimately care about readability and performance, temporary variables seem ideal even with this change in the language. Modern compilers look for things like temporary variables when performing optimizations. PHP's compiler probably already does this, and if it doesn't, adding support for that would make more sense than adding some new syntax.