Radu, that is basically the same thing as the list/array solution in PHP. Python though, has the advantage of some syntactic sugar for declaring tuples, so one doesn’t have to write the parens. That’s all. Is there a bigger difference and I’m not yet seeing it?

a, b = b, a

How cool is that?

1. That trick is slower than a temporary variable, but the time required to execute that assignment probably takes less than is needed for a fly to flip its wings once.
2. Following the same logic, objects and functions are probably bad because they introduce overhead, while simple global code does not.

There is a threshold when you really have to care about such optimizations, most likely after optimizing database access and heavy algorithms.

Also, comments are best for user programmers (by generating documentation from phpdoc comments), who want to use a certain library but don’t want to dive the source code. Additionally, comments *must* be used for hard to understand algorithms. Regardless of the above though, the API should talk for itself.

Finally, a temporary variable is probably the way to go, every PHP newbie would understand such a piece of code, but as the “overhead” introduced is so small it basically becomes a matter of taste. As it is with echo vs. print and single quotes vs. double quotes.

/**
 * does whatever
 *
 * @param string $_param1
 * @param string $_param2
 * @return array
 */
function myFunction( $_param1, $_param2 ) {
    /* voodoo */
    return $result;
}

Due to the comments and phpdoc tags, this function would be easy to use. You know what it does. But when you need to change the “content” of the function or how it does its stuff, code readability is a very important issue.

And beside, writing 3 lines of comments after each line of code just because you wanted to try an “elegant” and “original” approach is lame…