[RossM]

A few of PHP's most (publicly) hated components are being removed in 5.4 (which may become 6, from what I can tell this article is lying when it says 5.4 is "around the corner") - register_globals, magic_quotes is being discussed. Even the old asp_tags setting is going. However these have no relevance to me as I haven't used them in years.

[robryan]

If they are going that far, it would probably be better to get rid of more in one go, rather than giving people legacy code headaches with each release.

[philfreo]

What else do you think they should remove?

[robryan]

I guess I would focus on cleanup, method names and parameter orders. I don't know enough about the internals to know if also allowing say $var = $val->substring(0, 2); could be an alias to how values are currently passed into functions.