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Adam Trachtenberg is the Director of Platform and Services at eBay. Before eBay, Adam co-founded and served as vice president for development at two companies, Student.Com and TVGrid.Com. Adam is the author of Upgrading to PHP 5 and coauthor of PHP Cookbook. He lives in San Francisco, California.

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Did you know about PHP’s old_function?

April 5th, 2006 • Related • Filed Under

I was reviewing Upgrading to PHP 5 today and I came across this lovely section in Appendix B, which I had completely forgotten about:

PHP/FI had a quirky function declaration syntax:

function sum $a, $b (
    return($a + $b);
);

This was changed in PHP 3, but you could continue to use the old form in PHP 3 and PHP 4 if you declared your function as an old_function:

old_function sum $a, $b (
    return($a + $b);
);

Alas, after six years, this backward compatibility feature is now gone. Another nostalgic remnant of PHP/FI has passed away.

I must say, I used PHP/FI, but I never resorted to the old_function hack to ease my PHP 3 migration issues.

Did anybody ever use this?

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There Are 2 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by Chris Shiflett on 5 April 2006:

    I never knew about that. Thanks for the history lesson. :-)

  2. Comment by Rodney H. on 20 April 2006:

    They should bring it back:

    Totally_Retro_Dude sum $a, $b (
    return($a + $b);
    );

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