Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2008-08-15 16:36:48 - Graham Ellis
It's often the most surprising things that catch you out on language upgrades! Our new web server is running PHP 5 (5.2.6) whereas the old shared service was running PHP 4. No problem with the conversion, PHP wise, except the exchange rate page which goes to the European Central Bank's web site and reads the current rates from there. And what was the problem with that page? The Turkish currency called TRY in 3 character shorthand - which was fine in PHP 4 but has become a reserved word in PHP 5. So the code
The picture .. we're talking Turkey, and it's the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, taken in October 2004 on the Perl Whirl 2004 - cruising in the company of Larry Wall, Rasmus Lerdorf, Monty Widenius (Perl, PHP, MySQL) and others.
In the past, I have had a similar issue with a variable called yield in Python - since yield became a keyword. I am mindful of the same issues with say, given and when in Perl 5.10, although Perl's use of a $ in front of variable names will make these problems into very rare cases indeed - such as was the PHP try issue that I started with.
It's often the most surprising things that catch you out on language upgrades! Our new web server is running PHP 5 (5.2.6) whereas the old shared service was running PHP 4. No problem with the conversion, PHP wise, except the exchange rate page which goes to the European Central Bank's web site and reads the current rates from there. And what was the problem with that page? The Turkish currency called TRY in 3 character shorthand - which was fine in PHP 4 but has become a reserved word in PHP 5. So the code