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Are they skipping 6.X releases or something?

The latest release according to php.net [0] is 5.6.15 which come out October 29th of 2015.

For a long time, there was a PHP6 in the works, but then HHVM and Hack came around and started making PHP6 look bad. There was another fork called PHP-NG, I believe, which went in a different direction. There was a huge pissing match in the internals list, and in the end, I think they threw threw out most of the PHP6 proposals and started fresh. To clear up matters, they skipped PHP6 and called it PHP7.

Don't quote me on that, but that's my understanding of it.

The primary reasons for skipping PHP6 were that several books had been published on what PHP6 was supposed to be (full unicode support, for example), talks had been given and the original php 6 branch was ultimately ditched. The full list of reasons are at: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/php6

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