> > need to have their competence, professionalism, and intelligence > questioned.
Tony, making a statement like this is unprofessional in itself. You've already been asked to put emotions aside and discuss this topic on the technical merit, there's no need to question people's competence, professionalism, and intelligence. Please - can we all discuss this in a nice way, without insults, questioning intelligence, attacks, etc. Anyone who does not like the way that PHP works should be told to switch to > a language that they DO like. The millions of developers who have been > using the language for the past decade or so and who have made PHP the #1 > language for the internet DO NOT LIKE their language being broken. At risk of fighting fire with fire, the same could be said to you - if you don't like the language evolving and changing, switch to a language whose proposed modifications doesn't offend you so greatly... It's a trivial task to replace `var` with `public`, and if I had any voting karma, I'd vote +1 to remove `var`, based on the fact the intent of `public` is much clearer than `var`. If the change is well documented (and things like this usually are in my experience of PHP), then I don't see an issue. No-one will force anyone to upgrade to PHP 8 or 9 (whenever this change would be targeted for), you could happily continue using PHP 4 if you like, as others have pointed out.
