don't let the concatenated endline character confuse you.
sorry about that.

Thank you for taking the time to write to us, but this is not
a bug. Please double-check the documentation available at
http://www.php.net/manual/ and the instructions on how to report
a bug at http://bugs.php.net/how-to-report.php

Expected behaviour 

-Status:           Open
+Status:           Bogus

> Expected behaviour

Funny, I actually expected this response to my bug.  I think that's called recursion. [smiley-face]

I entertained your request of me to double-check the documentation.  I could only find the following mentions in the documentation:

"If $arr doesn't exist yet, it will be created. So this is also an alternative way to specify an array."

I couldn't find anything about "error reporting" for this situation (is this a [small] documentation bug?).  I'm not requesting the automatic-array-creation behavior be changed, I'm requesting a "Notice"--not even a "Warning" (see below)--be generated when E_NOTICE is set. 

Continuing in the documentation, there were numerous examples and array-"Do's and Don't's" showing which array index expresions generate E_NOTICE errors.  But nothing was mentioned of storing to indexes of previously undefined variables (I couldn't find documention on the "undefined variable" notice, either).

For the above, I only bothered looking closely at the following section of the manual:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.array.php

I'm sure I would have had more success had I made a more general, thorough and thus convincing argument.  But instead I'll just try to show the inconsistency of this "Expected behavior" with the following examples:

Example 2-1: Undefined array gives warning

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL); // This actually isn't needed.
array_push($not_an_array_yet, 'b');
exit("done\n");
?>

The above will output:

Warning: array_push(): First argument should be an array in example_2-1.php on line 3
done

Example 2-2: PHP syntax of undefined array without warning

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL);
$not_an_array_yet[] = 'b';
exit("done\n");
?>

The above will output:

done
Shouldn't it have been more "expected" for these to have behaved the same?  They did not.  And I'm actually just arguing for a "Notice" message and not the "Warning" which array_push() gives.  Because, as you may know, array_push doesn't create an array while the PHP syntax does.

So I submit these should have more comparable semantic definitions and thus both give warnings regardless if the PHP programmer chooses to use the more succinct PHP array syntax over using a function call. If there is some larger semantic difference between these two, I'm not aware of it.  Interestingly, the documentation suggests<http://www.php.net/array_push> using the empty-bracket notation.

Perhaps I should have categorized this as a "feature request"?  Because it is useful for PHP to make sure your array was previously defined and not simply a mistyped variable.