alvinphp wrote:PHP 5 has been out for over 2 years and I doubt you can find one public hosting company that does not support PHP 4 and 99% of those hosts do not support PHP 5.
Both are rectal approximations, and they are wrong.
The number of hosts (out of 15 million surveyed - there are likely more) is currently 8%, and the growth is increasing month-over-month.
There are also plenty of public hosting companies that do not support PHP4.
Dotgeek doesn't, and they aren't the only ones. Of course, that number will go from <10% to 100% shortly after PHP stops supporting PHP4 with security fixes and updates. Granted, there hasn't been a discussion of that yet, but it will "trigger the apocalypse" of change.
Until then, the Siren call that will lead hosting companies to PHP6 instead of PHP4/5 will be that 6 offers a built-in compiler, reducing overhead and increasing performance for customers SUBSTANTIALLY. Not to mention security improvements, new functionality, and more.
alvinphp wrote:The very few that do support PHP 5 require you to use the .php5 extension. PHP 6 is going to be the same way because a hosting company is not going to require their clients to upgrade their scripts.
Not true either. My host doesn't require .php5, it lets me use .php. It offers clients two different servers - one running php4, one running php5. Their goal is to increase the number of users on the php5 side, and reduce the users on the php4 side.
alvinphp wrote:Granted, you should still use <?php as it is the right way to do it and if you were ever to upgrade your site to PHP 6 then it will be one less thing to worry about. My only point was that if you have <?= ?> in your code now you shouldn't have to worry about this not working later on (at least on public hosts).
You *do* have to worry about it. You know it will not be possible to support, and sites will stop offering PHP4 eventually.
Code defensively. Get ahead of the game.
Gambler wrote:Short tags deprecated? Great. Even less features, even more typing. Even more "consistency" which breaks scripts. Now I need to write my own template engine, which will replace all that bloated crap. Design by committee rocks.
More features, not less. Full unicode support, built-in caching and compiling, reduced security issues (built-in input filter), and more. All of those add performance hits, that have to be offset. How? By removing dozens of legacy #ifdef statements that slow down processing and parsing. Thats
a great thing. If you think otherwise, feel free to keep running php4/5 until the wheels fall off, or until you write your own language.