What are the differences in accessing methods in PHP between versions 5 and earlier versions?

In PHP versions 5 and earlier, accessing methods of an object required using the arrow operator (->). However, in PHP 7 and later versions, you can use the double colon (::) operator to access methods of a class without creating an instance of the class. If you are working with code that was written in PHP 5 or earlier, you may need to update the method access syntax to be compatible with newer versions of PHP. 

// PHP 5 method access
$object = new MyClass();
$object->myMethod();

// PHP 7 method access
MyClass::myMethod();

Keywords

PHP 5 method access backward compatibility OOP function visibility

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