I was noodling around in PHP the other day and discovered that this works: ⧉ PHPphp $🍞 = "bread"; echo "Some delicious " . $🍞; I mean, there's no reason why it shouldn't work. An emoji is just a Unicode character (OK, not just a character - but we'll get on to that), so it should be fine to use anywhere. Emoji work perfectly well as function names: ⧉ PHPfunction 😺🐶() { echo "catdog!"; } …
I’m baffled at how the author just glosses over how the emoji for 5 doesn’t work “because functions can’t start with a number”.
This seems to imply there is some kind of textual substitution going on, which further implies I could call an emoji named function by some other plaintext name.