Changes In Store For PHP V6

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.

Comments

Quick summary

[Anonymous Coward]

... 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).

Re:Is this really news?

[dgatwood]

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.... :-)