The next PHP version will be called PHP 7.

The long dispute over the name of the next version of PHP is finally over today: so the next version will have sequence number 7 .

PHP7 will be based on PHPng . Many of the latest offers and patches are already made on its basis - including such interesting things as uniform variable syntax , native big integers and abstract syntax tree . Due to changes in the internal API , many third-party extensions (for example, xdebug, extensions for mongodb and memcached, php-protocolbuffers ) need to be reworked, so PHP 5.7 PHPng will not be able to enter. It would seem that the problem is not so great - but, for example, Yahoo uses about 400 different PHP extensions in its development, so the process should take some time.

When the question of choosing a number for the next version of PHP came up, the developers immediately remembered a previous attempt to make PHP 6, which started in 2005 and was discontinued in 2010 due to difficulties with implementing Unicode support. Therefore, all PHP6 innovations, except for the support itself, were later implemented in PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4.

But because of this failure against the name of PHP 6, the arguments were found quickly: there is still a lot of “Learn PHP6 in 1 hour” books on Amazon , which today are good only for kindling the furnace; about the "abandoned" PHP6 in the past there have been many reports at conferences; and in general - everything that was written about PHP 6 until 2010 - has not gone away and would create unnecessary confusion around the release. If we forget that the question “Why was PHP 7 after PHP 5?” Risks soon settling among the most popular topics on Toaster and StackOverflow, then there were no objective reasons not to miss out on the version from core developers.
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