PHP 5.6.0 | Hacker News Reader

PHP 5.6.0

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73 pointsjulien_c14 comments

Happy that they went with UTF-8 here: http://us.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.default-charset

Some nice improvements overall.

Good.

Dont know if i'll still be using PHP in 5 years, but I think PHP team is trying hard to turn the language around and bring some sanity to the project. PHP7 ,the next version will be an important step in the right direction.

Agreed. The sanity started coming around circa 5.4 and has been increasing rapidly. The variadic operators will cut down on the number of lame func_get_args() hacks I have to write in my RESTful routing code :)

I'm not sure how long you've been around, but if you remember the way that OOP was implemented in version 3, you'll realize they've been coming around for a while now.

I've been writing PHP since right before 4.3 was released, but I was still a n00b then (I was in the 6th Grade) and don't remember a lot of the pre-5.2 quagmires.

The biggest was probably that pass-by-value and pass-by-reference was flipped on its head in PHP4. Interesting times in PHP land back then!

I don't really follow PHP much, so indulge me - what happened to PHP 6?

What was supposed to be PHP 6 got turned into 5.5 after their attempt at unicode support went south. So now a bunch of folks want the next major version to be named PHP 7 on the basis that the name "PHP 6" has been tarnished.

As a primarily PHP developer right now I honestly don't care what they call it as long as it moves the language forward. But the simple fact that there was a grand debate on the mailing list about something so meaningless and unimportant while important things are ignored is just more confirmation that my decision to begin moving away from the language was the right one.

The PHP working group decided that they didn't want the baggage belonging to the previous attempt to color PHPNG. There's still a lot of articles about the "PHP 6" that never came to be. So they've decided to skip version 6 and go straight to PHP 7.

I think it's silly, personally.

It was meant to be the big unicode refactor, but they killed the project back in 2010. https://wiki.php.net/rfc/php6 has some background.

Not much.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#PHP_6_and_Unicode

I'm just about to start learning PHP, and I'm glad I'm doing so now.

Also posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8236748

Congrats to the PHP team. We're quite happy to see PHP 5.3 fully EOL'd recently and 5.6 now released. In trying to do our part to encourage adoption, we've already added support for 5.6 to ServerPilot (https://serverpilot.io/).

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