Chiming in with his thoughts on PHP6 and what changes should be made for it, Rasmus has sent a new email to the php-dev mailing list with his eight suggestions.

Since we are breaking a lot of stuff in 6.0, at least with Unicode_semantics=On I am wondering if it may not be time to break some more stuff and do a bit of spring cleaning. It would mean many apps would need some work to work on PHP 6, but at the same time I think it is work people would welcome since it would mostly involve removing hacks instead of adding them. And yes, I know this is pretty controversial, so take a few deep breaths before replying, please.

With things like "Remove safe_mode and focus on open_basedir" and "Remove magic_quotes_*/register_globals completely" I can see why he would give a bit a warning before. Not only would those be some very radical changes to the way that PHP works (and would be written), but despite the issues it would cause, everyone seems to be behind it.

It's enough to make one really crave PHP6 already...