PHP5 has made a real progress, but there's still some lacks, and before all a big mess, in PHP5.
What is the feature you want the most in PHP6?
Some ideas :
My dream is a "new" separate PHP branch, that would break backward compatibility and become a full programming language
"Cleaning the PHP function mess"
> I'm guessing you mean the inconsitencies in naming an parameters orders ?
If so, I hope this won't happen : it would be a pain to port scripts/applications from PHP 5 to PHP 6.
A great, and necessary thing, in my opinion, is full Unicode support -- and it's actually the main planned feature of PHP 6.
As a sidenote : it will not be UTF-8, but UTF-16.
"Method override in classes"
> What do you mean by that ? You can already extend classes and re-define methods in the child classes.
A nice thing, though, would be something like Traits -- there are already some discussions going on about that ; see Request for Comments: Traits for PHP
"multiple heritage"
> Not sure that would be such a good idea, actually...
To be honest, I really do want them to fix the inconsistencies [I mean, sometimes they use underlines, sometimes they dont [everything is lowercase too, so its hard to read].... oh, and sometimes its subject-verb, sometimes its verb-subject >_>] Examples: mysqli_real_escape_string, stristr
They might brick current applications, but its for the future. The language isn't going to get any better if they don't do something as simple as standardizing their naming procedures [And to be honest, right now its a mess... thats one of the main criticisms I see for php...]
If you think about it, once code IS ported from php5 to my ideal php6, it will be MUCH MORE straightforward/manageable [in my opinion]. The porting process wouldn't be as hard because you wouldn't have to be confused over whether to use underlines or not, or whether you would have to use verb-subject or subject-verb... It would also make it way easier to learn the c-like language.
I'm just dreaming.
I would guess he means different param signatures for methods. I miss that, sometimes. I've gotten over it using an array. I find it makes for sloppy looking code though, if for instance, in a constructor you have wildly different logic based on different parameter sets.
__construct( $param1, $param2 ){ // Handle case 1 };
__construct( $param3, $param4, $param5 ){ // Handle case 2 };
becomes
||
\/
__construct( $paramArr ){
foreach( $paramArr as $param ){
// Do your setting
}
// Handle case 1
// Handle case 2
}
As for function namespace... thats what happens when every library under the sun gets ported over directly from c. Shrug. I find the ol' google php {function_name} often returns the php documentation first thing. What I'd really like is a plugin for eclipse that makes the process of name/paramterization look up a lightning fast operation.
I really, really, really doubt php is going to go typed. I'm not saying I wouldn't mind an optional type hinting to do nice things like help with auto-complete and maybe give me a compiler warning now and again, but bugs of that nature are minimal with the right logging.
The 'slicing' method, as seen on python, will really really be great.
Edit: after the Marius comment (that make my day), this is it:
{} vs []
You can currently use both {} and [] to access string indexes.
But the {} notation will raise an E_STRICT in PHP5.1 and will
be gone totally in PHP6. Also the [] version
will gain substr and array_slice functionality directly -
so you could do "[2,]" to access characters 2 to the end, etc. Very handy.
And i'm loving it.
I wish they would turn Arrays and Strings into objects with methods attached, so you could, for example, do:
$str = "Hello StackOverflow";
echo $str->length;
$arr = array("one", "two", "three");
$arr->push("four");
I don't see how that would break anything, as they could still keep the old functions for manipulating strings and arrays.
The current casting support in PHP hasn't changed since... forever?
All we have to play with is:
(string) (integer) (array) (object) (float) ... any others?
A feature I would love to see is custom casting
If we consider "shipping" as a feature, that would be my #1. Wonder if Perl 6 or PHP 6 comes first?
Apart from that, removing register_globals and safe mode is awesome and overdue.
UTF-8 support for sure. Getting UTF-16 will be great, but I'm currently using UTF-8, so that would be even better. Though I guess I'll look at leaving UTF-8 for UTF-16 if the latter gets support and the former doesn't...