Chapter 2. New Features in PHP 7

PHP 7 has introduced new features that can help programmers write high-performing and effective code. Also, some old-fashioned features are completely removed, and PHP 7 will throw an error if used. Most of the fatal errors are now exceptions, so PHP won't show an ugly fatal error message any more; instead, it will go through an exception with the available details.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Type hints
• Namespaces and group use declarations
• The anonymous classes
• Old-style constructor deprecation
• The Spaceship operator
• The null coalesce operator
• Uniform variable syntax
• Miscellaneous changes