Reading our bug tracker I noticed a good feature request [1] from 2009 which points to an interesting feature that I think makes sense for us, since we are now working with $f() using objects and strings, and the array('class', 'method') is an old known for call_user_func()-like functions.

So, I wrote a patch [2] that allow such behavior to be consistent with arrays. See some examples:

class Hello { public function world($x) { echo "Hello, $x\n"; return $this; } }

$f = array('Hello','world'); var_dump($f('you'));

$f = array(new Hello, 'foo'); $f();

All such calls match with the call_user_func() behavior related to magic methods, static & non-static methods.

The array to be a valid callback should be a 2-element array, and it must be for the first element object/string and for the second string only. (just like our zend_is_callable() check and opcodes related to init call)

Any thoughts?