Date: 11/11/10 (PHP Community)    Keywords: no keywords

Does anybody know when that happened?

I just stumbled across it out of sheer desperation when I was using DOMXPath to access the text value of several single nodes:

$title = $xpath->query ('title', $ent)->item (0)->textContent;

I'm absolutely certain that when I first started (4.0? 3.x?) this was illegal since you could not follow a function call with any operator on the return value. The parser simply did not allow it and so the above code could only be written:

$nodelist = $xpath->query ('title', $ent);
$node = $nodelist->item (0);
$title = $node->textContent;

Of course, they didn't have objects then but the same was true of arrays:
$myFunction ()[0] was illegal, now it's not.

Source: http://php.livejournal.com/680758.html