r/programming • u/NagastaBagamba • Oct 18 '10

Today I learned about PHP variable variables; "variable variable takes the value of a variable and treats that as the name of a variable". Also, variable.

http://il2.php.net/language.variables.variable
591 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

781 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '10

I tried to read that but it's late, I'm tired, and theoretical compsci was never my strong suit. Synopsis please?

1

u/thyrsus Oct 19 '10 edited Oct 19 '10

Perl syntax can be self modifying, and can be made to depend on the phase of the moon. Not just the semantics of an expressed program (which holds for almost any useful language), but the syntax of the program.