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Comment by Jasber | Hacker News Reader

I actually like where PHP6 is headed: http://www.php.net/~derick/meeting-notes.html

There are a couple things I don't agree with. Like adding goto statements. Really? Come on...PHP...

But it seems PHP6 wants to finally remove old deprecated behavior (registered globals/magic quotes/safe mode) which I think is a good thing.

Not to mention namespaces will be a great addition to the language.

At first I had an issue upgrading to PHP5. It didn't have the same speed boost PHP3->PHP4 had, so I didn't see the need to change.

But then I actually looked into the new features.

The OOP improvements, exceptions, SimpleXML and iterator support are all great features I use daily and wouldn't want to move back to PHP4.

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PHP programmers + Goto statements? Oh dear lord...

Sorry, I know not all PHP programmers are like that, but still...

I'm also stoked they're finally removing crap like register_globals and magic_quotes. "Safe mode" caused many headaches as well trying to get software running on all possible configurations, adding lots of little restrictions without much real benefit (patching symptoms vs solving the real problem).

IMO they should have done these in PHP5. They already broke b/c with the object system (passing by reference instead of by copying), which was smart but troublesome for any complex OOP code written in PHP4. If you're already breaking b/c badly enough, just tear the band-aid off all at once I say.

They aren't adding 'goto' statements. But they are allowing you to jump to labels with break statements, which is similar.

While slightly different, this creates the same exact problem as goto statements.

Reading/writing code should be linear.

Introducing goto statements allows you to "jump around" inside your code--which is bad form and confusing.

If goto is good enough for Linus, it's good enough for me.

http://kerneltrap.org/node/553/2131

Then again, I don't imagine there are many Linus-caliber developers working in PHP. This could get ugly.

According to Andrei Zmievski, greatly improved unicode support is a big priority too, which of course will be nice for i18n stuff.

Unicode support would be great.

Is this planned for PHP6 or just being discussed?

It's definitely planned. Here's an interview with Zmievski about it: http://www.fosdem.org/2008/interview/andrei+zmievski

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