New features in PHP7

PHP 7 is coming out soon and is a great improvement on previous versions. There’s been a lot of great movement in the community with plenty of RFCs and the language is definitely moving in the right direction.

Here are some great features that you’ll really want to know about

Support for hats

PHP 7 comes with support for a variety of hats. How? Use this handy method get_hat().

Support for 6

The number 6 is now fully supported in PHP7. Previous uses of the number 6 would result in a T_UNEXPECTED_CHWE error but now they can be inserted into code like any other number. For backwards compatibility two 3 or half a 12 can still be used but these methods will throw a deprecated notice.

get_hat method deprecated

The get_hat method introduced in PHP7 has been deprecated. Use get_hat_real() instead.

new error type E_RETHINK_YOUR_LIFE

A warning for WordPress developers.

Support for line numbers

Following PHP 5.3′s introduction of the goto operator PHP7 now features line numbers. Also available are peek and poke functions, plus the ability to switch into Teletext Mode 7.

Licking your own elbows

PHP7 can lick your own elbows so you no longer need to use the ternary operator.

Reverse execution mode

Add define(“execution_mode”, M_REVERSE); to the top of some files sometimes to set execution mode into reverse. The op-code cache has been completely re-written to allow both forward, reverse and random execution sequences.