New features in PHP 7
Soft Landing
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How will developers have to change their PHP 5 scripts to conform to the new PHP 7? We look at some of the important changes.
PHP 7 [1] was just released at the end of 2015 and updated to version 7.0.2 early in January 2016. In addition to providing 64-bit support throughout, the new major release of the scripting language gets rid of a variety of ugly hacks. The "PHP 7 Install" box describes the installation of stable version 7.0.2.
Coming to Terms with the Past
The PHP 7 developers managed to increase the expressiveness of their linguistic resources by revising historical defects – at the expense of losing backward compatibility. However, it isn't necessarily the smaller changes that are responsible for the troubles. For example, PHP 7 might only still allow one default clause per switch instruction and prohibit the same function parameters as in:
function foo($value, $ignored, $ignored)
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