Resetting PHP 6

“Rightly or wrongly, many in our community see Perl 6 as the
definitive example of vaporware. But what about PHP 6? This release
was first discussed by the PHP core developers back in 2005. There
have been books on the shelves purporting to cover PHP 6 since at
least 2008. But, in March 2010, the PHP 6 release is not out – in
fact, it is not even close to out. Recent events suggest that PHP 6
will not be released before 2011 – if, indeed, it is released at
all.

“PHP 6 was, as befits a major release, meant to bring some
serious changes to the language. To begin with, the safe_mode
feature which is the whipping boy for PHP security – or the lack
thereof – will be consigned to an unloved oblivion; the
“register_globals” feature will be gone as well. The proposed
traits feature would bring “horizontal reuse” to the language;
think of traits as a PHPish answer to multiple inheritance or
Java’s interfaces. A new 64-bit integer type is planned. PHP was
slated to gain a goto keyword (though the plan was to avoid the
scary goto name and add target labels to break instead). Some basic
static typing features are under consideration. There was even talk
of adding namespaces to the language and making function and class
names be case-sensitive.

“The really big change in PHP 6, though, was the shift to
Unicode throughout. Anybody who is running a web site which does
not use Unicode is almost certainly wishing that things were
otherwise – trust your editor on this one. It is possible to
support Unicode to an extent even if the language in use is not
aware of Unicode, but it is a painful and error-prone affair;
proper Unicode support requires a language which understands
Unicode strings.”

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