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Adam Trachtenberg is the Director of the LinkedIn Developer Network, where he oversees developer relations and marketing for the LinkedIn Platform. Before LinkedIn, Adam worked at eBay in platform product management and marketing. Even earlier, he co-founded Student.Com and TVGrid.com. Adam is the author of PHP Cookbook and Upgrading to PHP 5. He lives in San Francisco.

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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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