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Changes In Store For PHP V6

Posted by kdawson on from the ready-or-not dept.

An anonymous reader sends in an IBM DeveloperWorks article detailing the changes coming in PHP V6 — from namespaces, to Web 2.0 built-ins, to a few features that are being removed.

4 of 368 comments (clear)

  1. Quick summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... for those too lazy to RTFA:
    Additions:
    Better Unicode support
    Namespaces! (this is being backported to PHP 5.3)
    SOAP and the XML Writer/Reader modules compiled in and enabled by default (also in PHP 5.3)
    Removals:
    magic_quotes, register_globals, register_long_arrays, safe_mode
    ASP-style short tags ()
    Freetype1/GD1 support
    ereg (use of preg encouraged instead).

  2. Re:Is this really news? by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Informative

    What makes PHP nice is that, language-wise, it is basically C plus a subset of C++ wrapped up in a scripting language. Almost any code written in C (or C++ without templates/exceptions/other icky stuff) can be trivially ported to PHP by replacing the type names with "var" and adding dollar signs in the right places. (I'm exaggerating slightly, but not much.)

    PHP doesn't have any weird syntax like Perl regular expressions---you can do Perl regex, but it is neatly encapsultated into proper strings the way it should be. There's no having to manually re-indent dozens of lines of code because you needed to add another nesting level and whitespace is part of the language, etc. It's just a really clean, lightweight OO language that's exceptionally easy to learn and happens to integrate very well with HTML.

    Don't get me wrong, PHP has plenty of weak points when it comes to performance (particularly when dealing with massive complex data structures), availability of modules to do various obscure things, etc., but as a language, it is pretty nice, IMHO---mainly because it isn't a kitchen sink like Perl.... :-)

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  3. Re:Magic Quotes Removed by Quietust · · Score: 3, Informative

    So does this mean that if you are using magic quotes and you upgrade to PHP6, suddenly you will become vulnerable to SQL injection attack?
    It would probably be more accurate to say that you will become more vulnerable to SQL injection attacks, since magic_quotes was never 100% foolproof to begin with.
    --
    * Q
    P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
  4. Re:Real change by jyurkiw · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ever wondered why they picked the '.' for a concatenation operator over the trusty '+'?

    PHP is a loosely-typed language.

    The '+' is also the arithmetic operator.

    Is a line of code reading
    $c = $a + $b
    adding $a and $b? or is it concatenating them?

    What if $a = 513 and $b = 4201?
    Are we talking about a phone number? Or am I trying to come up with $c = 4714?

    There was a very good reason for having '.' as the concatenation operator.