There's an RFC that has been recently declined through the PHP internals list. It is a minor change/patch to introduces a short synthax to declare arrays in PHP.

To declare an array in PHP, you currently use the following synthax:

$a = array('foo' => 'bar', 'nestarray' => array(0, 1, 5));


The proposed patch (a few lines) would allow to declare arrays in a shorter form:

$a = array('foo' => 'bar', 'nestarray' => array(0, 1, 5));

// New synthax
$a = ['foo'=> 'bar', 'nestarray'=> [0, 1, 5]];
// Or
$a = ['foo': 'bar', 'nestarray': [0, 1, 5]];


This notation is used by many programming languages, most notably javascript. Since PHP is essentially a programming language used for the Web, my opinion is it makes perfect sense to support a javascript-like notation for arrays.

There's some resistance from the core developers and overall there were too many veto (negative) votes. I definitely understand their concern but feel it's a natural evolution of the language, this to me seems like something most users would want to see in PHP.

Hopefully, the PHP community can speak out enough to get better idea of what the users / php community wants.

The actual proposal and more info at:
http://wiki.php.net/rfc/shortsyntaxforarrays.