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.

Comments

Re:Time to pay the piper...

[FictionPimp]

This is why I never write legacy code, only progressive forward thinking code!

People who write legacy code are just not thinking of the future.

question:

[larry bagina]

are these ass clowns still planning on using \ for namespaces?

A likely story

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I can tell, PHP 6 is probably a long way off. End of 2009 at the very earliest. Consider this: PHP 5.3 introduced RC1 in March with the idea of 1-2 week intervals, and, here in May, we're still not at RC2.

Given that PHP 6 was "rumored" to be out at least a year ago. I can't decide if the title "An Early Look" is meant to be ironic, or is just a sad indicator of progress.

Despite that, I would say that three things have recently happened demonstrating the improvement in quality of PHP:

1. End of Life of PHP 4
2. Many important improvments in PHP 5.3
3. Unicode in PHP 6

I would say that (1) and (2) easily are more important for the language than is (3). PHP 5.3's improvements should be a huge change: Namespaces (I know there's a huge amount of hate for this implementation: get over it. It's going to be very useful), Closures / Lambda Functions, and Late Static Bindings in particular make it hard to wait so long for PHP 5.3.

So, stop talking about PHP 6! Lets get PHP 5.3 out.

One of these things is not like the OOthers

[Ukab the Great]

One of these things just doesn't belong

python:

myArray.append(myvalue)

ruby:

myArray.push(myvalue)

objective-c:

[myArray addObject: myvalue]

smalltalk:

myArray add: myvalue

PHP:

array_push($myarray, $myvalue)

Re:One of these things is not like the OOthers

[ABasketOfPups]

Or...

PHP:
$myarray[] = $myvalue;

Well wouldn't you know

[omuls are tasty]

In the finest tradition of PHP, they made Unicode behaviour dependent on a setting. Have these people learnt nothing from the past? magic_quotes anyone? Bleh. All languages have their warts, but the amount of bad design decisions in this one is just staggering.

Re:Finally

[Yvan256]

That's so cliché.

Broken Link in Summary

[Udigs]

here's the correct one: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-future/