What is this called in php: ->

The member access operator. Sometimes called the single arrow operator or the dereference operator.

Simply enough, it's called the arrow operator

ETA:

As others have mentioned, the documentation also calls this token the "object operator". So, the docs aren't entirely self consistent, which I suppose is true of any real world documentation.

It's also known as T_OBJECT_OPERATOR in the tokenizer/parser http://de3.php.net/manual/en/tokens.php