Anonymous PHP functions

The latest Zend newsletter (Issue #333) pointed to a new patch posted by Wez Furelong for anonymous functions in PHP. This would allow users to write things like :

$data = array(“zoo”, “orange”, “car”, “lemon”, “apple”);<br /> usort($data, function($a, $b) { return strcmp($a, $b); });<br /> var_dump($data); # data is sorted alphabetically

The discussion is detailed in the newsletter, but in short I find the idea very useful to write functions on the fly instead of using create_function() especially if it’s for quick usage with other functions such usort.