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Date: Sun, 06 Apr 2008 13:52:58 -0700
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To: Lester Caine <lester@lsces.co.uk>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] What is the current state of PHP6?
From: andrei@gravitonic.com (Andrei Zmievski)

Lester Caine wrote:
> I KEEP asking what is holding up making a beta release of PHP6, and I 
> see nothing in the 2005 meeting that is anything more than a restructure 
> and recompile using unicode as the base. MOST of the other things are 
> just removing things that are now normally switched off anyway. And I 
> mean a BETA since the thing has been in alpha for 2 years!
> 
> I will ask this question again as I cant find ANYTHING on the php.net 
> site to answer it. *IS* PHP6 going to be unicode ONLY internally are is 
> half of the problem here that THAT decision still has not been agreed?

The current state is indeed not very well documented, but your best bet is to 
look in the discussion archives for the thread called "why we must get rid of 
unicode.semantics switch ASAP". I think there was an agreement that PHP 6 should 
  not have that switch, but whether PHP 6 will have binary strings on by default 
or unicode ones is another thing. I think most of people were leaning to having 
BC maintained as much as possible and thus having binary strings on (which is 
not my view, but that's another matter).

We also discussed building a set of testing and migration tools (also in that 
thread, I believe), which would enable us to make sure that there are as few BC 
issues as possible. However, no one has stepped up to do that yet. If you'd like 
to help in any way, please let us know.

-Andrei