PHP6 - What do you need?

Hi Folks,

Like many of you, I have been awaiting PHP6 for some time - especially since all those pre-emptive manuals appeared on the shelves of my local bookstore some time ago. The main wait, as far as I can make out has been down to the inability to agree on a way forward with regard to dealing with unicode. Please correct me if I'm wrong. However, with many of the developements earmarked for v6 being pressed into the most recent 5.x releases, one wonders what sort of goodies we should expect from v6 when (or if) it finally appears. The powers that be seem to have developed a pretty rigid release cycle for v5 over the next few years.

So anyway, what do you think should be included or improved?

I for one, would love to see string functions being fully usable with UTF-8 without having to resort to mb_* functions. In addition, perhaps standardising the order of parameters within string functions, as they seem to be pretty random at the moment. I would imagine that these new improved functions would need new names though or it could be carnage. These are pretty minor or even petty gripes though.

Anybody care to share?

[pritaeas]

I would love to see an overhaul of functions and parameters. Please let them ditch the procedural (sql) functions too. No, not deprecated, I want to see them removed. Let's make everything a class: session, files, get and post superglobals are excellent candidates.

Please let them ditch the procedural (sql) functions too. No, not deprecated, I want to see them removed.

I agree, although I still class myself as an oop noob, this would have ensured that I could code robust solutions. No choice, get yer hands dirty!

Oh, how about all those sort functions? Surely they could come up with a meaningful parameterized generic sort() function? Drives me insane! I have to revise the php manual every time I need this sort (no pun intended) of functionality. Oops, starting to rant. :)