PHP 5.3 Released

Sudheer writes "The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.3.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features and bug fixes. Some of the key new features include: namespaces, late static binding, closures, optional garbage collection for cyclic references, new extensions (like ext/phar, ext/intl and ext/fileinfo), over 140 bug fixes and much more."

Comments

Looking Forward To It

[TheNinjaroach]

Say what you will about PHP, but it puts food on my table and a good roof over my head. I have been clamoring for the new features in PHP 5.3.0 (closures, namespaces, they finally killed register_globals) and can't wait for the improvements coming in 6.

I truly appreciate the hard work of the PHP development team and the free language they have given us, congratulations on the new release.

Re:features!

[vivaoporto]

I didn't said "exception handling", but "error handling", like linux kernel developers use.

Anyway, exceptions in languages like Java which enforces its treatment in compile time are more than just a "goto error handling". It all depends on the language you are using.

Re:Would you let it die already?

[iluvcapra]

I think if the functions, calling conventions and naming were regularized

...and they removed the sigils, and removed the silent type coercion, and eliminated the "@" function prefix, and removed the "global" keyword, and removed the weird "list" lvalue function that looks-like-functional-pattern-matching-but-really-just-cosmetically, and fixed the pass-by-reference semantic...

But if you did all of these things, it really wouldn't be PHP anymore.

Re:Hooray fileinfo is standard!

[i_ate_god]

__construct() is a magic method, just like __get(), __set(), __destruct(), __isset(), __toString(), so on and so forth. Magic methods are called without the programmer having to call them, under specific circumstances. In the case of __construct(), it's called when an object is instantiated. '__' defines a magic method and was chosen back in the day because PHP didn't have protected/private members and so the common practice was to prefix private/protected members with one underscore.

PHP was a solution to Perl, so -> is what Perl uses so that's what PHP uses.

The function naming is not so much an issue either. But what is frustrating is argument order. That's something that really needs to be revamped, backwards compatibility be damned.