How can “[” be an operator in the PHP language specification?

Question

On the http://php.net/manual/en/language.operators.precedence.php webpage, the second highest precedence level contains a left-associative operator called [.

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Answer 1

In PHP you can initialize empty arrays with [] so in order to know how to define an array the precedence of the next character defines on how to initialize the array.

Since arrays are part of the syntax structure, it is done before any math, it simply has a higher precedence than other calculative operators for that reason.

var_dump([5, 6, 7] + [1, 2, 3, 4]); # 5674 - The array's must be known before applying the operator

However in all honesty I don't really understand the question. In most programming languages the [ and the ] are associated with arrays which is part of the base syntax that always have a high priority (if not the highest)