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An Early Look At What's Coming In PHP V6
IndioMan writes "In this article, learn about the new PHP V6 features in detail. Learn how it is easier to use, more secure, and more suitable for internationalization. New PHP V6 features include improved support for Unicode, clean-up of several functions, improved extensions, engine additions, changes to OO functions, and PHP additions."
Update — May 7th at 16:47 GMT by SS: IBM seems to have removed the article linked in the summary. Here's a different yet related article about the future of PHP, but it's a year old.
All very good. But there is no set release date; I wonder when PHP 6 will be released?
They have been working on PHP 6 since at least 2005, and from monitoring announcement etc., I haven't seen any signs that they are nearing a release.
So let's say you've got a global variable, $n
And let's say you're using it in a module, Foo
And because scattering global variables everywhere is a stupid idea that will lead to much pain, let's say you've decided to use namespaces in PHP6.
Now, in your main script, let's say you happen to be using a variable $Foo, for no particular reason.
What does this do?
<?php
echo "Hello $Foo\n";
?>
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
One thing I hope PHP would have is GUI stuff for both Windows and Linux. Its a great language for everything, and I use it constantly for scripts and other stuff. I've even written ircbots and servers with it, and they all work great and are nice to work with.
However the GUI design with the existing tools is just pain in the ass, and it doesnt offer a good way to turn your code into machine code.
I do understand that theres programming languages like c/c++ and delphi and several others, but from all of those php is the nicest to use, even for non-webpages stuff.
I dont think it would be that hard to implement such, given theres people to do it and understand how PHP can be greatly used for non-webserver stuff aswell. Or is there something against it that I havent thought of?
I wouldn't mind, but my boss likes to get paid when i work for him...
A general upgrade project we run looks like:
1. We talk to the customer that the site that WE wrote for him now sucks because WE wrote it with function xyz that is now broken and sucks. ( we formulate this different, but this is about how it feels to the customer )
2. customer complains that he paid for his site and that he expects it to just work.
3. we explain that our knowledge of what will happen to future versions of the product is rather limited and that we therefore in principle can only make the best dessisions at a given time, that we regret the problems, but cannot help it. we then usually evaluate the components that are used in the website, CMS version, modules, tweaks, how much was done by outsourcing, etc and send it of to the customer.
4. customers views the estimate and nearly dies from a heart attack when he sees what it will cost to port his website to a new php version without any increase in function.
5. if we were lucky in fase 3 / 4 we have been able to get him addicted to some additional services as well that "only work with php5" making the upgrade path somewhat worth it. If that fails the customer in 90% of the cases won't think the upgrade path is worth it and will arange with us that we will keep hosting the site but without warrenty.
This has not so much to do with being lazy, but more with being in a commercial company and having a customer that does not think it's worth to pay.
Because it's syntactically similar to C. It's remarkably close to what C++ should have been---C with classes, integrated hashes, variable-length arrays, and usable string manipulation. Thus, for long-time C programmers, it's a very natural language to pick.
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I've programmed in both C and C++ and I've used PHP GTK and I'd choose X86 Assembler to build a GUI before I choose PHP for desktop GUI development. And all of the benefits you mentioned are almost completely alleviated with Boost
Excuse me while I gather the virgin sacrifice and assemble the pentagram required to solve your problem
Oh and $array[] = $value;
Coding, you should learn it.
Or maybe the PHP designers should, cuz I know quite a few programming languages and that syntax does not look like "append a value to an array" to me. It looks more like some kind of borked pointer assignment, or a way or re-initializing an array to contain a single value.
Breakfast served all day!
They are really going to destroy the language with this idea. Its a *VERY* bad design decision, and they really don't care what the community thinks of it. People suggested using ::: ... that claim its too many characters to type. Ok, how about : or . or one of the other suggestions.
The decision was made in IRC without any community input. People are very unhappy with it, and they don't care. It almost makes me embarrassed to be a PHP developer.
Maybe with some luck, a competent development team will fork it.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
I didn't mind PHP until I tried porting a a PHP text processing application I'd written into C++. The conversion into C++ (with STL and Boost) was essentially line-for-line, so the lines of code was the same, but the C++ was more readable. The PHP runtime was 32ms, while the C++ was 1.9ms.
Even in PHP territory, PHP wasn't giving any advantages, but several disadvantages.