What Is New in PHP 7?

To better performance, the following technical changes appear in PHP 7. We should familiarize themselves with these changes if they intend to switch over to using PHP 7 for their web development projects. R

Return Types

Return types, a common feature in most other programming languages, have finally been introduced to PHP. This means that programmers can now specify the type of variable that a function should return. In PHP 7, the return type is specified after the closing parenthesis of the argument list:

Spaceship Operator

We can use to quickly and conveniently compare two expressions. Use this operator as follows:

a <=> b

• If a is less than b, this expression outputs -1
• If a is equal to b, this expression outputs 0
• If a is greater than b, this expression outputs 1

Using this operator to compare variables requires much less typing than coding multiple tests with the traditional less than (<), equal to (==) and (>) greater than operators do.

Also, we can check the matching type like “===” instead “==”

Other Syntax Changes

• Old-fashioned error handling has been replaced with object-oriented exceptions. This change is intended to make it easier for developers to find and fix bugs in their code.
• Syntax for variable referencing has been changed to make it more consistent.
• The syntax for the foreach statement has changed.
• The list() operator no longer supports strings.
• In PHP 5.6, a bug allowed the switch statement to have multiple default clauses, leading to code behaving unpredictably. This bug has now been fixed.
• PHP 7 features more consistent conversions between integers and floating point numbers. This change eliminates some surprising errors that can occur when you intentionally or accidentally convert a variable that was initially stored as an integer into a floating point number, which is not necessarily a whole number, or a floating point into an integer.
• The old-fashioned syntax for marking comments in INI files has been removed. Instead of prefixing comments with the # symbol, you now need to use a semi-colon instead.