when it comes to create_function(), id say its just as painful as building functions with html or writing queries by hand. namely, its prone to a lot of string escaping which produces awful hard to read code. i mean, the kind of code you write yourself and then look at a week later and say 'what a mess'... anyway, it occurs to me that the closest thing php has to functional languages, thats readily usable is the variable function mechanism http://www.php.net/manual/en/functions.variable-functions.php theres been discussion about it on the list in the past, though often it is spoken of as a ghost feature. its quite nice. as an example, suppose you have a string $blah = 'myFunc'; then if myFunc is defined as a function, it can be invoked per $blah(/* params */); it creates the ability to do all sorts of powerful things, such as delegation whereby switch statements can be eliminated, callbacks, whereby a formal parameter could be a string that refers to a method name, and they work on object references as well. so you can get away w/ $this->$dynamicFuncName(/* params*/); in some sense you are passing around a function, but in reality there is no preservation of context at all. whats worse, the function that gets invoked had better be loaded into the interpreter or youll encounter a runtime error. but i do enjoy this feature. honestly im still struggling with closures as i continue to grow my skills with javascript, but at least the concepts are starting to sink in. being able to create anonymous functions on the fly would be a welcome feature in my book; and hey, how about anonymous objects while were at it ;) -nathan
