On dotdev.co Eric L. Barnes explains a new feature that is coming in PHP 7.1

With the accepted proposal it creates an alternative to using “list” for destructuring an array. In all previous versions of PHP this works like this: list($a, $b, $c) = array(1, 2, 3); Now you can extract using a square bracket just as you do for assignment: [$a, $b, $c] = [1, 2, 3]; ["a" => $a, "b" => $b] = ["a" => a, "b", => 2];