For web developers and php programmer, PHP is not a new programming language as it is most used for designing websites and platforms like Drupal. We had always heard through various articles on the web that the PHP version 5 was in the process of being changed to PHP version 6, but so far there was no news about it. All we can say is that there will never be PHP 6. The PHP language will go straight from current version 5.6 to version 7.
The essence of PHP
PHP known as "Hypertext Preprocessor" offers the advantage of creating and generating dynamic web pages. Its appearance in the family of interpreted and object-oriented languages also contributed to the foundation of the LAMP projects or also currently called Web 2.0, which are sites which almost meet the intrinsic needs of Internet users and which are substantially equal to traditional applications.
Despite its performance in this environment, the introduction of new language features has encountered a bit of a slowdown given the long studies conducted for performance concerns, the introduction of Zend Engines to produce Bytecode by compiling the language, as well as the introduction of Unicode support from UTF-16.
The PHP 6 project
Much work has been done on improvements starting with PHP 5, except most of them did not go as planned. Some of them have breaks in their compatibility that had to be sorted out: main branch 5 maintenance releases, i.e. 5.1-5.2-5.3, etc. and other versions that could affect compatibility. All this work led to the PHP 6 project which unfortunately fell behind schedule and was abandoned in March 2010. Indeed, the latest improvements have been integrated into PHP 5.4 which does not yet take Unicode into account. The latest version that the developers have been waiting for and about to release is PHP 5.6.
The PHP 7 project
The project towards PHP 6 is still relevant except that it is no longer called PHP 6. According to the votes between 82 developers, 58 votes decided to give a new name to the project and 24 were against.
