So, as this wasn't changed back again, we had to adapt an ewiki now is enhanced with some typecasts to keep it working for recent PHP5 versions. So the rest of this page is history.

The upcoming version 5 of the PHP scripting language differs from PHP4 in that it comes with overworked extensions and a new interpreter kernel known as the *ZendEngine2. This new engine was heavily enhanced in terms of speed and functionality, and now should provide far superiour object-oriented functionality for the PHP scripting language, while still keeping source and binary compatiblity to ZE1 and PHP4 (other so called scripting languages like Perl and Python usually fail on both, when it comes to new versions). Vacuums, Cleaning & Storage Multitools

While the Zend poeple now tried to ensure compatibility for painless upgrades and fast adoption of the new technology, some of the PHP development guys now decided to make their own thing. The recently announced beta2 differs in many points from the beta1. bissell spotlifter

Recent discussions on the php-dev@ mailing list seem to annotate, that some of the developers have choosen to make PHP variables further more strictly typed (like C++ or Java), which of course is in contrast to the previous design as scripting language. One of the changes was introduced by a bogus bug report, which now got fixed by crippling the array_merge() function to make it fail where previous PHP versions worked. The problem with the current fix is that it implements a hard abort instead of printing just a language warning as originally intended. electrolux filters Metal Folding Tools

This change will make ewiki fail on future PHP versions, as it will make many other PHP projects fail then. As stated before, the PHP team currently shows no interest in fixing it back. Therefore I ask you to check if your scripts now refuse to work (a large amount will, because the mentioned one wasn't the only change), and then go and file a bug report on the PHP Web site.

persists with php5.0.0-rc2

No change in the latest pre-releases of PHP5, but there is appearantly a note (php5-rc2/README.PHP4-TO-PHP5-THIN-CHANGES) about the incompatiblities now - but one that only states half-thruths:

3. array_merge() was changed to accept only arrays. If a non-array variable is
   passed, a E_WARNING will be thrown for every such parameter. Be careful
   because your code may start emitting E_WARNING out of the blue.

what it doesn't explain is, that array_merge() not only issues a warning (what could be considered senseful) but silently drops all input variables, even if the real array_merge() function could handle it (yes, it's only the half-finished recently added wrapper code that doesn't want to deal with uninitialized arrays). Gear

explicit typecasting

This is what code will look in the near future:

  $result = array_merge( (array)$a1, (array)$a2, (array)$a3, ... );

PHP used to autoconvert variables according to how and where they were used formerly (according to the specs and manual).