Laravel 4 syntax error out-of-the-box

Question

I just installed Laravel 4 (Illuminate) and as I opened the index.php file in a browser, I was met with this error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected 'yield' (T_YIELD), expecting identifier (T_STRING) in /www/Laravel4/vendor/illuminate/view/src/Illuminate/View/Environment.php on line 339

I have fixed the permissions for the meta folder, and installed all the dependencies through Composer. I am running PHP version 5.5.0alpha2 on OSX 10.8.2.

Answer 1

That's because yield became a language construct in PHP 5.5 (used in Generators) - but someone decided that it's a good idea to use this short word to name a function:

public function yield($section)
{
  return isset($this->sections[$section]) ? $this->sections[$section] : '';
}

Downgrade to PHP 5.4 (after all, it's the current mainstream version, 5.5 is not even in beta yet) and it should work fine.