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

PHP5 References

[djace]

Yeah, sure, "just around the corner". That's what they said a year ago :P

Some interesting slashdot PHP5 references:
"PHP5 is well under development and a beta is expected out by March 2003 and released summer 2003"
Introduction to PHP5

General PHP5 References:
Changes in PHP 5/Zend Engine 2.0
Pidget: The PHP Widget Library

Re:The superiority of PHP over Pearl

[Michalson]

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.

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?

[FrangoAssado]

Well, for a quick and simple example, instead of writing

function f($a, $b) { return strcmp($b, $a); }

usort($array, 'f');

you could just write something like

usort($array, function ($a, $b) { return strcmp($b, $a); });

With this, functions would be first-class objects, which probably complicates the internals of the language, but it could be added when the reestructuring for improved OOP was done.