hellorobot.org

IBM has an article outlining some of the changes coming to PHP with version 6. I guess I’m a little disappointed.

Namespaces are being introduced, as is better core support for SOAP and XML. Some things are being deprecated that ought to be deprecated – and likely will have no affect on up-to-date websites and servers because the scripts and server settings will already avoid these things: safe_mode, register_globals, the old long predefined variable arrays (like $HTTP_GET_VARS), the ASP-like open/close script tags (<% and %>).

Only one change will have any affect on my scripts. Because the POSIX regular expressions (ereg() and ereg_replace()) are being deprecated, they need to be replaced with PCRE functions – preg() and preg_replace().

These are good changes, and some of the deprecations that close security holes are great changes, but I wanted fancy new features. Honestly, I’m not sure what I would want; I was thinking about it after I saw the article. I’d love to see proper method overloading but I can’t really think of much else.