Wow, I can’t believe I missed this…nobody seems to be talking about it at all. Ever since PHP 5.3, I can finally do non-generic callbacks.

UPDATE: Check out this description of PHP lambdas (much better than what I’ve done in the following).

function do_something($value)
{
    // used >= 2 times, but only in this function, so no need for a global
    $local_function = function($value) { ... };

    // use our wonderful anonymous function
    $result = $local_function($value);
    ...
    // and again
    $result = $local_function($result);
    return $result;
}

There’s also some other great stuff you can do:

$favorite_songs = array(
    array('name' => 'hit me baby one more time', 'artist' => 'britney'),
    array('name' => 'genie in a bottle', 'artist' => 'xtina'),
    array('name' => 'last resort', 'artist' => 'papa roach')
);
$song_names = array_map(function($item) { return $item['name']; }, $favorite_songs);

GnArLy bra. If PHP was 20 miles behind Lisp, it just caught up by about 30 feet. This has wonderful implications because there are a lot of functions that take a callback, and the only way to use them was to define a global function and send in an array() callback. Terrible. Inexcusable. Vomit-inducing.

Not only can you now use anonymous functions for things like array_map() and preg_replace_callback(), you can define your own functions that take functions as arguments:

function do_something_binary($fn_success, $fn_failed)
{
    $success = ...
    if($success)
    {
        return $fn_success();
    }
    return $fn_failed();
}

do_something_binary(
    function() { echo "I successfully fucked a goat!"; },
    function() { echo "The goat got away..."; }
);

Sure, you could just return $success and call whichever function you need after that, but this is just a simple example. It can be very useful to encapsulate code and send it somewhere, this is just a demonstration of the beautiful new world that just opened for PHP.

So drop your crap shared host (unless it has >= 5.3.0), get a VPS, and start using this wonderful new feature.

Holaaa. Added a code section on the main page that I plan to more more into. It’s got tag searching (intersection-based) for all two pieces of code posted (in case you can’t find one or the other) but there’s going to be more coming up, hopefully.

So go check it out. All the code on there is free to use, distribute, sell, whatever you want. Just give me credit, or prepare yourself for hand-to-hand combat.

kkthxbai