Re: PHP 5.1

At 07:18 PM 6/5/2005 +0200, Marcus Boerger wrote:

There are a few things i'd like to address before: 1) return by reference at c-level. This is already taken care of by dmitry who is currently working on a better patch than mine. However i need this to finalizy ArrayAccess interface. And i need a bit of a time to experiment with the result and maybe others want to give their input as well. At the moment the problem is that it cannot deal with references at all but there is already coe out with 5.0 that used that issue. So here is just somewhat work and testing needed.

I saw some work of Dmitry's on this issue. Will look what's happening with it.

2) PHP is all about the putting out text so nearly all objects created in PHP are meant to put something onto the generated pages. Thus i think i am not alone to suggest we put back the magic __toString function in place as we said when we dropped it's support from 5.0. Also it is very hard to explain why "echo $a . $obj" and "echo $a, $obj" output different things when one is an object. Both is pretty much against the spirit of PHP - easiness isn't it?

I thought you were going to write a patch up. Did you look into it?

3) Is 5.1 coming out without filtering?

Obviously not. I don't see anyone actively working on it. I am hoping to allocate resources to it in the near future but it'll come out when it comes out, especially as it's an extension. It might even live in PECL until everyone is happy with it. I want to try and work on an API proposal first because I believe the API is where the issue is and not the coding...

4) I still want the ifsetor operator since it is very helpfull and again simplifies a lot of things.

I don't think ifsetor() shortcut is a big deal nor needed in PHP. I've said it numerous times. Once we have a filtering API there will be even less times where it will be applicable. Write an extra 10 characters or so...

5) tons of other stuff i menationed offline and in public - since i lost the energy in tracking all that issues i guess the work and time in those wasn't worse the effort and they can wait anyway :-)

Yes, many bugs have been fixed and issues have been addressed. Like always, there will always be open issues. It has been like this with every PHP release. Most important is to make sure that PHP 5.1 is only better and not worse than PHP 5.0, which I'm confident it is. And bringing PDO to the PHP community, and allowing for Unicode work to fold into PHP dev tree is the most important goal. Andi