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PHP5 Just Around the Corner

Posted by Hemos on from the coming-around-the-corner-when-it-comes dept.

HitByASquirrel writes "Just doing the rounds and I found that Zend has released PHP 5.0 Beta 4: 'This fourth beta of PHP 5 is also scheduled to be the last one (barring unexpected surprises, that did occur with beta 3). This beta incorporates dozens of bug fixes since Beta 3, rewritten exceptions support, improved interfaces support, new experimental SOAP support, as well as lots of other improvements, some of which are documented in the ChangeLog.' Hopefully they won't have any 'unexpected surprises' and we'll see this before summer!"

3 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Why no lexical closures? by ajagci · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Does every little scripting language have to repeat the same mistakes? Lisp 1.5 thought it could get by without. Perl did. Python did. Lua did. In the end, they all added them.

    Come on, guys, learn something from history, avoid making the same mistakes over and over again, and add lexical closures to PHP.

    1. Re:Why no lexical closures? by gid · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So what's the matter with doing it the old way?

      Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems defining the function inline makes the code less readable, and more cluttered. PHP isn't really about being able to mimick the perl one line "goodness". Written properly, php code is very readable and easily maintainable. If feel that's one of the major reasons for it's popularity.

      That and the low learning curve and excellent online docs. I have a one stop shop for php documentation. I rarely need any other docs besides php.net/searchstring

  2. Re:The superiority of PHP over Pearl by Michalson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    5) php developers are heartlessy disgarding every kind of backward compatibility with every new minor version they write, e.g. your old scripts which worked finely for 4-5 months may be buggy without you even knowing it after 1 mysterious update.

    That has to be the absolute worst. Not only do the minor versions break large numbers of scripts, they do it for the sillest reasons - php has some incredible powerful and language changing options (like magic quotes, which entirely change how you handle input), yet they insist on changing the defaults for these every time they increment a number. The real business world doesn't have the time and re$ource$ to be constantly updating code and mangling configurations just because some open source team can't make up their mind.