PHP syntax for dereferencing function result

Question

Background

In every other programming language I use on a regular basis, it is simple to operate on the return value of a function without declaring

Answer 1

Well, you could use any of the following solutions, depending on the situation:

function foo() {
    return array("foo","bar","foobar","barfoo","tofu");
}
echo(array_shift(foo())); // prints "foo"
echo(array_pop(foo())); // prints "tofu"

Or you can grab specific values from the returned array using list():

list($foo, $bar) = foo();
echo($foo); // prints "foo"
echo($bar); // print "bar"

Edit: the example code for each() I gave earlier was incorrect. each() returns a key-value pair. So it might be easier to use foreach():

foreach(foo() as $key=>$val) {
    echo($val);
}