Little known change of PHP 5.4: you don’t have to use the call_user_func() function anymore to call generic callables!

Before 5.4 you could only use () to call variables when the type was a String or Closure, otherwise you would have to use call_user_func(). Since 5.4 however, you can simply do () on anything which satisfies the callable typehint, as illustrated below:

<?php

class Foo
{
	function bar()
    {
        echo "Hello World\n";
    }
}

$cb = array(new Foo, "bar");
$cb();

$cb = "strlen";
var_dump($cb("foo"));

(Try it)

Currently this doesn’t make much difference, but it’s a nice step to improve readability a bit.

Together with Argument Unpacking (currently slated for 5.6) this could make call_user_func_array() obsolete too.

Yay! We won’t have to use functions to call functions anymore!