What does this mean? “Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM”

Question

T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM sounds really exotic, but most certainly absolutely nonsense to me. I traced it all down to this lines of code:

Answer 1

if you still need to use the double-colon then make sure your on PHP 5.3+

Answer 2

For anyone using Laravel. I was having the same error on Laravel 7.0. The error looked like this

syntax error, unexpected '::' (T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM), expecting ';' or ','

It was in my Routes\web.php file, which looked like this

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use // this was an extra **use** statement that gave me the error

Route::get('/', function () {
    return view('save-online.index');
})->name('save-online.index');