PHP 7—the most dramatic update to the language in over a decade—has arrived. This O’Reilly report provides you with a short guide to the major changes in this new release, including a revamped engine (Zend Engine 3), a bunch of new features, and lots of language cleanup. You’ll learn about basic language changes, deprecated features, Unicode enhancements, changes in Object-Oriented programming, and other enhancements.
You’ll also discover why it’s taken more than 10 years for the first new major version of PHP since PHP 5 to appear—and what happened to version 6 in the meantime.
Get important details regarding changes to PHP 7, including:
- Deprecated features, starting with alternative PHP tags and POSIX-compatible regular expressions
- Uniform Variable Syntax, including consistency fixes and new syntax
- Basic language changes, such as new operators, constant arrays, new functions, and regular expressions
- Expectations and Assertions
- Error handling
- Enhancements to PHP’s Unicode, closure, and Generator features
- Changes in Object-Oriented programming
- Scalar type hints (perhaps the most polarizing and exciting new feature)