PHP5 Just Around the Corner

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!"

Comments

Re: PHP and Backward Compatibility

[Paul Burney]

You said...

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.

Thank you for bringing that up. That's been my biggest complaint with PHP. Some examples include:

• redefining the way that strtok works
  
  
• changing the syntax for the deleting cookies without mentioning it in the change log or documentation (for 3.1 - 4.someting you could just call setcookie('variablename','') to unset the cookie. They switched it so you needed to add all the parameters to the function call, date, server, path, etc.)
  
  
• breaking the error_reporting() function for several versions, forcing users to rewrite their calls using ini_set() instead.

It seems that any time there is an update for PHP, something else gets broken. I cringe when my sys admin tells me he wants to update it, because I know it's going to lead to hours of debugging work that I shouldn't need to do.

Re:Why no lexical closures?

[Tablizer]

The vast majority of things that closures would be used for can be done with "eval()" and "execute()" like functions that evaluate in context. Although they may not be as "clean" as pure closures, eval and execute are conceptually simple and will do the job for the occassional times dynamic execution is needed. Closures just tend to frighten away people from a language. Closures == "those damned math nerds got their fingers into it" :-)