An Early Look At What's Coming In PHP V6 307
IndioMan writes "In this article, learn about the new PHP V6 features in detail. Learn how it is easier to use, more secure, and more suitable for internationalization. New PHP V6 features include improved support for Unicode, clean-up of several functions, improved extensions, engine additions, changes to OO functions, and PHP additions."
Update — May 7th at 16:47 GMT by SS: IBM seems to have removed the article linked in the summary. Here's a different yet related article about the future of PHP, but it's a year old.
Finally (Score:2, Insightful)
It's about time PHP has native support for unicode.
Re:Finally (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing I hope PHP would have is GUI stuff for both Windows and Linux. Its a great language for everything, and I use it constantly for scripts and other stuff. I've even written ircbots and servers with it, and they all work great and are nice to work with.
However the GUI design with the existing tools is just pain in the ass, and it doesnt offer a good way to turn your code into machine code.
I do understand that theres programming languages like c/c++ and delphi and several others, but from all of those php is the nicest to use, even for non-webpages stuff.
I dont think it would be that hard to implement such, given theres people to do it and understand how PHP can be greatly used for non-webserver stuff aswell. Or is there something against it that I havent thought of?
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Re:Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
Because it's syntactically similar to C. It's remarkably close to what C++ should have been---C with classes, integrated hashes, variable-length arrays, and usable string manipulation. Thus, for long-time C programmers, it's a very natural language to pick.
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But you can use Boost [boost.com] with any language, I don't see your point.
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Re:Finally (Score:4, Informative)
PHP is much, much closer to C than C++ with truckloads of STL piled on top. Ask a C programmer to comprehend that mess and you'll likely have a suicide on your hands. It is very un-C-like. The point is that the PHP syntax for arrays is very nearly identical in behavior and syntax to C, just with lots of extra functionality (variable length associative array). I never said that C++ couldn't do those things, but as far as I've seen, when you do it in C++, you're generally way off the deep end as far as being syntactically familiar to C programmers.
I guess what it comes down to is this: if you think templates are elegant, then we will never agree about what makes a good language design. From my perspective, templates are what happens when somebody forgets that we have a perfectly good C preprocessor and decides to reinvent the wheel with a clumsy syntax that doesn't provide anything more than what C preprocessing could already provide, wedging the concept into the language itself for no apparent reason. It is anathema. It is absolutely the antithesis of good language design.
As for OO in PHP, I don't see why you think dynamic typing decreases the value of object-oriented programming. If you really are mostly using the same code with different underlying types, then there's little point in doing OO, but in my experience, that's the exception rather than the rule. Most of the situations where I've used OO with polymorphism, I've had polymorphism, but the underlying implementation has differed substantially, and the only thing similar was the method name (and the general concept for what the function does).
Also, it is nice to use classes even when you don't need polymorphism. This reduces pollution of the global function namespace. It also makes it easy to create complex data structures that make life easier. (PHP doesn't have the notion of a struct, so you have to either use a class or an associative array.)
Finally PHP is still very much a typed language. It's not like there is no notion of types and everything is polymorphic with everything. The type of a variable is determined when the variable is assigned, and some types can be coerced into other types in certain use cases, but it isn't universal. I can't do if ($arrayA < $scalarB), for example. PHP even has the notion of casting to force type conversion just like you do in C. For example:
function myfunc($mynumber) {
...
$mynumber = (int)$mynumber;
}
Dynamic typing doesn't mean the types aren't there. If you call a method on an object that doesn't exist on that object, it is still an error. And so on. Dynamic typing just makes it a little easier to shoot yourself in the foot by not throwing up an error when you make the assignment or function call in the first place. :-)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There's nothing preventing a native foreach notation built into the language instead of glued on. They just didn't do it that way, and they should have.
Sure. It's pretty easy. You just define two macros (e.g. BASE_TYPE and ARRAY_TYPE) and then #include a header.
#define BASE_TYPE uint64_t *
#define ARRAY_TYPE uint64_t_pointer
#include <CustomArray.h>
And in CustomArray.h>:
#define MAX_SIZE 32
class ARRAY_TYPE
{
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No, there's nothing preventing you from including that header file multiple times for different types. That's the beauty of token gluing. It concatenates the base type as part of the name of the derived array type, so you can create arbitrary numbers of them for arbitrary types. And unlike the template class, whenever you use the resulting type, it just looks like an ordinary C++ class instance with no need for template parameters. Thus, when you actually use the class, you just use "Array_int *foo" or
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Funny, very very dry, but damn funny.
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I didn't mind PHP until I tried porting a a PHP text processing application I'd written into C++. The conversion into C++ (with STL and Boost) was essentially line-for-line, so the lines of code was the same, but the C++ was more readable. The PHP runtime was 32ms, while the C++ was 1.9ms.
Even in PHP territory, PHP wasn't giving any advantages, but several disadvantages.
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Interesting thought. Does anyone use PHP for anything other than its ubiquity?
Re:Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
Ubiquity is a pretty compelling feature.
I mean, BeOS is pretty bitchin', but I'm not spending any of my time on developing applications for it.
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$output = fopen('outputfile.txt', 'wt'); // writes out data in UTF-8 encoding
fwrite($fp, $uni);
..... not where you expect it it dossent....
Re:Finally (Score:5, Funny)
Too bad Slashdot still wonâ(TM)t.
I mean, won't.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Funny)
That's so cliché.
So... (Score:5, Informative)
without wanting to be overly sarcastic..
What features are they gonne break this time?
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Gotta break some eggs to make an omelet.
Hopefully this will include cleaning up the argument lists of the string and array functions so that they hall take f($needle, $haystack) in a consistent order. Fixing the argument lists isn't in TFA, but it's a really obvious place to start.
At work, it may give me an excuse to rewrite a horrible old app that's been holding us back since the days of PHP4. I suspect I am not alone in wanting to see some old (buggy, slow, insecure, poorly designed) PHP apps get ruined so that they can be redeveloped now that PHP5 is actually a decent language.
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mod +1; I also hate the Needle/Haystack Haystack/Needle operator ordering..
of course upgrading your code to make it compliant will be a PITA...
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
At my work we host and have build and maintain a little over 200 php websites. We host them all ourselves. ( the CMS that we use is build in PHP )
We earn money from both the hosting and the developing.
Many of our customers don't want to pay for the porting of their websites to PHP5, let alone PHP6. usually this requires upgrading the CMS as well, making modifications to custom extentions written by outsourcing partys, etc. All in all quite expensive for the site owner.
"Threatening" them with PHP4 server shutdowns only makes them go away to other hosting providers that will over PHP4 to them.
So we ended up virtualising all the PHP4 sites together with a good backup system and making our customers understand that we provide no warrenty anymore. We will help them when things blow up on an paid per hour basis.
Another problem is that we cannot reuse a lot of our code anymore now. Many of our new plugins require php5 so we have to modify them to make them php4 compatible again.
when php6 comes out we will have to support three different php versions... the horrors of that vision already scare me today..
Cry me a river (Score:3, Interesting)
Staying up to date is part of doing business. Would you use a cab that still used horses? Get on a steam train with open box carts?
While progress for progress sake can be overrated the simple fact is that we learn from mistakes and improve on the stuff we make. There comes a time when being conservative turns you into a technical ludite and as a tech company you got to ask yourself, is this worth it?
Is there a business in supplying coal for instance? Some people still heat their houses with it, but does t
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Is there a business in supplying coal for instance? Some people still heat their houses with it, but does that mean YOU as a business man have to run a business to supply them?
No, but it does mean if YOU choose not to supply them with coal, somebody else will.
The parent isn't complaining because he doesn't want to stay up to date. He's complaining that they have a lot of customers who don't want to stay up to date, and there's nothing he can do about that except stop taking their money.
Ask yourself, how much time does it cost you to keep the people happy who want PHP4 and how much that same time could have earned you in business from PHP5 customers.
Unfortunately, turning away PHP4 customers doesn't mean more PHP5 customers will suddenly sign up. They are currently supporting both, and while of course there is a cost associated with continue
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There are some new features in php 5 and php 6, but besides some worst offenders (magic quotes and registered globals) are entirely backwards compatible with PHP 4 code.
I had the pleasure of upgrading a Large website from PHP 4 to PHP 5 and it was honestly quite trivial. 5 to 6 will be the same, except for removing the option of turning magic quotes and registered globals back on. But you fixed it the right way from 4 to 5 by not using them anymore anyway, riiiight? :)
Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wouldn't mind, but my boss likes to get paid when i work for him...
A general upgrade project we run looks like:
1. We talk to the customer that the site that WE wrote for him now sucks because WE wrote it with function xyz that is now broken and sucks. ( we formulate this different, but this is about how it feels to the customer )
2. customer complains that he paid for his site and that he expects it to just work.
3. we explain that our knowledge of what will happen to future versions of the product is rather limited and that we therefore in principle can only make the best dessisions at a given time, that we regret the problems, but cannot help it. we then usually evaluate the components that are used in the website, CMS version, modules, tweaks, how much was done by outsourcing, etc and send it of to the customer.
4. customers views the estimate and nearly dies from a heart attack when he sees what it will cost to port his website to a new php version without any increase in function.
5. if we were lucky in fase 3 / 4 we have been able to get him addicted to some additional services as well that "only work with php5" making the upgrade path somewhat worth it. If that fails the customer in 90% of the cases won't think the upgrade path is worth it and will arange with us that we will keep hosting the site but without warrenty.
This has not so much to do with being lazy, but more with being in a commercial company and having a customer that does not think it's worth to pay.
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If you want something that maintains compatibility, go with java.
Depending on your point of view, that could be a negative or a positive.
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If you want something that maintains compatibility, go with java.
Depending on your point of view, that could be a negative or a positive.
This was the first PHP related story on Slashdot that didn't have a few dozen replies that mention Java until you went ahead and ruined it.
I'd choose Java over PHP any day though.
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At least I ruined it by being informative. :P
Java applets coded back in 1996 still run [slashdot.org] in the newest JRE. Pretty impressive for the consumer/user, though it must be a nightmare to maintain.
I'm not aware of any huge changes to Apache Tomcat in the past few years - certainly nothing that required re-coding an entire website from scratch.
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I wish i was trolling, but trust me, i work for a company that hosts sites, and there is still plenty of php4 around. Most people don't mind the upgrading and staying up to date part so much. But they usually don't like the price that comes attached with it.
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Still recalling a horror of writing in Perl in 90s, I would say PHP is good, more or less.
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It won't happen to the base functions simply for backwards-compatibility, but given that namespace support is being added into PHP6 (I think it's also in 5.3; I have 5.2.6 on my machine so I don't know for sure) they could re-map all of those old functions in the global namespace into new logically-named and consistent functions. Array and string manipulation functions come to mind as the worst offenders, but there's plenty of other bad stuff as well. I think a lot of it would do well to be remade into bui
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You must be confused, are you thinking of Perl?
PHP has been VERY careful about breaking features, and have essentially openly mocked the people who suggest they "fix" PHP's functions by randomly swapping argument order on functions that have been working just fine for years.
The only thing I can think of they've broken is MAGIC_QUOTES and registered globals. Both are Very Bad Things that it was important they do away with. Any sane PHP code will react to their removal by simply removing a few chunks of goo
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But if Python does it, its okay?
No. From whose ass did you pull that strawman from?
So, when will PHP 6 be released? (Score:4, Interesting)
All very good. But there is no set release date; I wonder when PHP 6 will be released?
They have been working on PHP 6 since at least 2005, and from monitoring announcement etc., I haven't seen any signs that they are nearing a release.
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Time to pay the piper... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Time to pay the piper... (Score:5, Funny)
This is why I never write legacy code, only progressive forward thinking code!
People who write legacy code are just not thinking of the future.
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You will love it when they add functional approach and constructs. Declarative style in php for more points!
Re:Time to pay the piper... (Score:4, Insightful)
You're not far off track. A lot of PHP's problems stems from the fact that the language itself was more or less kind of thrown together rather than planned out (from the early simple Personal Home Page scripting stuff to PHP3 that just kept extending things and adding more functionality bolted on). They only just began to start to stabalize some of that in PHP4 and really only started to fix a lot of issues in PHP5 and now PHP6. They are making good strides but there's a lot of work to do (and a lot of backwards compatible considerations, I'm sure).
The good news for PHP developers with legacy code is that they've had a long time to fix things. Stuff that is going away has been deprecated for many versions now so none of this should be a surprise. The people that will get hit are the site administrators using PHP based apps that haven't been updated in forever.
Re:Time to pay the piper... (Score:5, Funny)
I think PHP developers with legacy code are going to be paying the price for several versions to come.
I prefer to call it "job security".
question: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:question: (Score:4, Informative)
Yes :(
Re:question: (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:question: (Score:5, Funny)
Can you blame them for trying to escape?
Re:question: (Score:5, Interesting)
They are really going to destroy the language with this idea. Its a *VERY* bad design decision, and they really don't care what the community thinks of it. People suggested using ::: ... that claim its too many characters to type. Ok, how about : or . or one of the other suggestions.
The decision was made in IRC without any community input. People are very unhappy with it, and they don't care. It almost makes me embarrassed to be a PHP developer.
Maybe with some luck, a competent development team will fork it.
A likely story (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that PHP 6 was "rumored" to be out at least a year ago. I can't decide if the title "An Early Look" is meant to be ironic, or is just a sad indicator of progress.
Despite that, I would say that three things have recently happened demonstrating the improvement in quality of PHP:
I would say that (1) and (2) easily are more important for the language than is (3). PHP 5.3's improvements should be a huge change: Namespaces (I know there's a huge amount of hate for this implementation: get over it. It's going to be very useful), Closures / Lambda Functions, and Late Static Bindings in particular make it hard to wait so long for PHP 5.3.
So, stop talking about PHP 6! Lets get PHP 5.3 out.
Hope it handles Search/Replace better (Score:2)
I hope it handles search/replace better. I tried doing a search/replace on a 88MB large string and the stupid script crashed! ;-)
Seriously, though, if anyone knows of any good tactics for large-string searching/replacing, I'd be happy to hear them. My current attempt is multiple page loads in an iFrame while the user is presented with a "working on it..." message.
Re:Hope it handles Search/Replace better (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hope it handles Search/Replace better (Score:4, Insightful)
Loading 88MB file into memory is not going to work by default anyhow, unless you set the memory limit in PHP from the default you will get out of memory errors every time. I think even a find/replace in a Windows app like Notepad or Notepad++ will "work" but it will definitely be slow. When I used to search large logs I would use some sort of file splitter and search each file itself.
And here the rest of us are grepping and sedding multi-gigabyte files without thinking twice. Seriously, what's your idea of a large file?
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If you want to process large files (or any large chunks of data such as blob columns) in PHP without loading the entire file into memory, look into streams.
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Seth
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Assuming this 88MB string is in a file, you should never load the whole file. Open the file and read it chunk by chunk. As you read it chunk by chunk, do a search/replace on each chunk and write the replaced chunk to another file. You need to remember to catch the matches that span more than once chunk though.
The question should really be why you are dealing with an 88MB file in PHP...
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Well, I once had to use PHP to re-import a MSSQL DB that was something like 25GB because no SQL machine was able to import even one of the 133 (?) files that made up the DB contents. Had to leave it running for something like 17 hours, but I think it ended up getting the job done well enough for what needed to be done.
But yeah, I tend to avoid dealing with any large files in PHP whenever possible.
Limited cleanup (Score:5, Insightful)
clean-up of several functions
Does that include safe_quote_string_this_time_i_really_freaking_mean_it, or do_foo(needle, haystack) and foo_do(haystack, needle)? At least it gets namespaces after all this time, even if they're almost deliberately ugly.
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All I want is for $foo[0] and $foo["0"] to not be the same reference.
Re:Limited cleanup (Score:5, Funny)
But that might break something that two people found convenient in 1997 and therefore can never be repudiated.
One of these things is not like the OOthers (Score:5, Insightful)
One of these things just doesn't belong
python:
myArray.append(myvalue)
ruby:
myArray.push(myvalue)
objective-c:
[myArray addObject: myvalue]
smalltalk:
myArray add: myvalue
PHP:
array_push($myarray, $myvalue)
Re:One of these things is not like the OOthers (Score:5, Informative)
Or...
PHP:
$myarray[] = $myvalue;
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Python: myArray.append(myvalue)
Well, you could do something like:
and squint until it looks like list_append, but that's kinda silly. And that $myarray[]=$myvalue; syntax? That should be taken out and shot.
Indeed it does not (Score:2, Insightful)
Market share: PHP 50%, ASP 49%, rest perl.
When PHP and ASP don't totally dominate the job listings, please come back to me again. In the meantime I know which of the function calls pays for my food.
Oh and $array[] = $value;
Coding, you should learn it.
Re:Indeed it does not (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh and $array[] = $value;
Coding, you should learn it.
Or maybe the PHP designers should, cuz I know quite a few programming languages and that syntax does not look like "append a value to an array" to me. It looks more like some kind of borked pointer assignment, or a way or re-initializing an array to contain a single value.
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Fun fact: arrays are not objects in PHP*. Not surprisingly, this means that they don't have properties or methods.
*Another poster already pointed out that PHP does have array objects, and having looked, array objects DO have an append method.
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They should have used # instead of the backslash for namespaces, that way, what I type will coincide with what I wish I was doing to the asshat that came up with that namespace delimiter.
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Octothorpe?
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In no language has quote escaping been the correct approach to putting untrusted data into a SQL statement for quite a long time (even if a language provides only this approach, it's still not the right approach). That stuff is kept for legacy support.
Switch to PDO and start using bound parameters. No matter what happens with the database and heretofore unconsidered character sets, this will never suddenly become vulnerable to a SQL injection when you upgrade your database server.
My items to be fixed (Score:3, Insightful)
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PHP compiles regex's transparently automatically. If you've used a pattern recently, it will not reparse the statement.
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Improve array speed (for simple arrays, use internally one simple C array/list - current days, any array is a map);
Try the SplFixedArray class [php.net]. The SPL data structures are much, much faster. [blueparabola.com] I actually rather like the "easy by default, fast when you need it" dichotomy.
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You also forgot: <p>
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Change your default post settings to "Plain old text" and it will.
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No problem.
Incidentally, HTML still works in "Plain old text" posting mode... so you have to use the HTML entities <, >, &, etc.
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# Insert optional configurations by project (and not by host);
-1 You can already do this via .htaccess sans security resourse limits which should be per host on shared hosting.
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Look into ini_set(). There are a couple odd things you can't override through that, but 95% of the standard configuration can be changed that way. The only thing that doesn't that immediately comes to mind is one of the magic_quotes settings, presumably because the superglobals have already been established by the time you've hit the override function - and magic quotes is finally going away in php6 so that'll be a non-issue moving forward.
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Namespaces (Score:5, Interesting)
So let's say you've got a global variable, $n
And let's say you're using it in a module, Foo
And because scattering global variables everywhere is a stupid idea that will lead to much pain, let's say you've decided to use namespaces in PHP6.
Now, in your main script, let's say you happen to be using a variable $Foo, for no particular reason.
What does this do?
<?php
echo "Hello $Foo\n";
?>
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Use {$Foo} instead. It's the proper way to put variables in a string.
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It will print
Hello 3
Because the namespace begins with a backslash ('\foo\n') and when using it inside double quoted strings must be "\\foo\\n".
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Say that $Foo=3
It will print
Hello 3
Because the namespace begins with a backslash ('\foo\n') and when using it inside double quoted strings must be "\\foo\\n".
The example in the article didn't mention leading with a backslash, or at least I don't think it did (it's been slashdotted, apparently).
And seriously? You have to escape the backslashes? What if you want a literal backslash now?
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Hey, I can't imagine that would be asked a lot or anything. There's no way that would be in the PHP FAQ [php.net]!
Oh wait...
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It'll print $Foo followed by a newline.
Foo\$n would print $n in the Foo namespace. I think. Strictly speaking, you should wrap it in curly braces if you're using anything other than a "non-complex" (for lack of a better term) variable, including array contents and object members.
If variable $Foo was a string that contained the name of some namespace ("bar", for example), then if it wasn't in a quoted string context it would look for constant bar\n, but constants aren't echoed when quoted.
That said, I still
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Gesundheit.
Well wouldn't you know (Score:5, Insightful)
In the finest tradition of PHP, they made Unicode behaviour dependent on a setting. Have these people learnt nothing from the past? magic_quotes anyone? Bleh. All languages have their warts, but the amount of bad design decisions in this one is just staggering.
FTFY (Score:2)
All languages have their warts, but the total lack of design decisions in this one is just staggering.
Re:Well wouldn't you know (Score:5, Insightful)
Stack Overflow has a question from last year titled Worst PHP practice found in your experience?. Earlier today, I submitted the answer whose summary is "The worst practice in PHP is having the language's behavior change based on a settings file."
Great minds think alike!
New to this version (Score:3, Informative)
Its like fast food.. (Score:5, Funny)
PHP: its like fast food..
You know its bad for you...
You feel like crap after eating it...
But damnit, its right there, oh so conveniently located on the way to work, and sometimes a greasy cheeseburger just hits the spot, even though you know you'll pay for it later in heartburn and much later in high cholesterol and love handles, even though right now its really cheap on the wallet.
Its a guilty pleasure.
And while you're sucking down that greaseball burger, you see the local soup and salad restaraunt and think "next time, I'll eat right.."
But come the next day and you see that taco joint and..
Broken Link in Summary (Score:5, Informative)
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PHP5 has a fairly proper inheritance and member visibility model and is truly reference based (i.e. $objX = $objY means, in PHP5, that they are reference to the same object instance... opposed to PHP4 where $objX = $objY made a FULL copy of the object to $objX).
So they've got to the level of Java 1.0. Congratulations!
Oh, actually, sorry, they didn't, since there are still no namespaces. But there will be soon, and then it'll be at the level of Java 1.0. Once again, congratulations!
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How good is the object oriented support in PHP these days?
Everyone involved with PHP pretty openly admits that PHP5's OO model is a direct ripoff of Java, so inheritance, abstracts, interfaces, and access modifiers work pretty much the same way as they do in Java. If you like Java's OO, you should be fine with PHP5's.
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I hate to say it, but this wouldn't be the first time on /. when an article was submitted with a link that was a year or more older and the article made it to the main page. Particularly since the article the GP linked to is a year old to the day.
I can only imagine the submitter/approver looked at the date, say May 6th, and went "OMG, that's today!!!111"
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