can't get my head round this php array

[visibleman]

Interesting, I'd not heard that before. Presumably with opcode caching it's a non-issue?

It still seems to be quicker to use brackets although this is all from memory of a project (pre-php8) a handful or so years ago where i was quickly testing different approaches whilst needing to handle stupidly large (many millions of indexes) dynamic arrays. I never delved into it much otherwise and it would probably be one for StackOverflow.

I imagine using JIT would make a massive dent in that difference though.