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PHP 5.6.0 Released

Posted by timothy on from the still-hard-to-pronounce dept.

An anonymous reader writes The PHP team has announced the release of PHP 5.6.0. New features include constant scalar expressions, exponentiation using the ** operator, function and constant importing with the use keyword, support for file uploads larger than 2 GB, and phpdbg as an interactive integrated debugger SAPI. The team also notes important changes affecting compatibility. For example: "Array keys won't be overwritten when defining an array as a property of a class via an array literal," json_decode() is now more strict at parsing JSON syntax, and GMP resources are now objects. Here is the migration guide, the full change log, and the downloads page.

3 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Now almost as useful as python was 5 years ago! by i+kan+reed · · Score: 1, Informative

    But more seriously, though. Most of these new features are straight up things that python already does.

    Const expressions? Since at least 2.0.
    ** syntax since forever.
    integrated debuggers since 2.5ish
    file size restrictions since never?

    I mean... these are really kinda bad things to just now be getting to.

  2. Re:Now almost as useful as python was 5 years ago! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    For what it's worth getArray()[3] was working two years ago (it's been working since PHP 5.4)

  3. PHP making great progress by justin+samuel · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm certainly biased because my company (ServerPilot) sells a service for PHP developers using DigitalOcean and other servers, but it does seem like PHP is making great progress in the past few years both in the language and in terms of a strong developer community. We're very glad to see PHP 5.3 EOL'd recently. To encourage adoption of 5.6, we've already packaged and added support for 5.6.