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PHP 6 existed (check commits in the public repo) but was abandoned and never released to public.

The voting page lists more info https://wiki.php.net/rfc/php6#vote

Annoyingly, a few authors decided to jump the gun and publish books around PHP 6. I think this was the main deciding point. On the one hand, it might be confusing for a newcomer who thinks that they're getting a book on the latest and greatest; on the other, perhaps they should check publication dates.

Either way, it wasn't a particularly important decision - any number signifying a major version bump, greater than 5, would have been fine.

I don't know about that last point. Why even keep version numbers at all if you're going to skip over a version?

Chrome started the path to irrelevancy for version numbers, PHP is following the trend.

Yeah, http://www.amazon.ca/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=php+6 I wonder if publishing against "vaporware" (not exactly, but anyway) is an expected risk in the industry. Would be interesting to hear what the people who are affected in that sense think of this.

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