Dave’s away and I get to indiscriminately litter his blog with posts, so I just wanted to mention something that got me a bit excited a few days ago.

I subscribe to the DevZone RSS feed so I get the (daily) Zend Weekly Summaries. A few days ago they reported on a conversation about anonymous functions. Now, you should really read TFA to get the full picture, but basically this is how anonymous functions (don’t) work in PHP at the moment:

[php]
< ?php
$arr_plus_one = array_map(create_function("int", "return ++$int;"), $arr);
?>
[/php]

Bollocks, right? Well the proposal is for a new syntax for this which would bring PHP much more in line with modern languages like JavaScript:

[php]
< ?php
$arr_plus_one = array_map(function($int) { return ++$int; }, $arr);
?>
[/php]

Much better, yeah? Well the discussion is really more about whether this function should become full-blown closure support in PHP, rather than just a new anonymous function syntax. I just wanted to put it out there and say that I strongly believe Zend should implement full closure support for PHP 6, even if the scoping rules are dodgy. I know newbies are going to be confused by the scoping rules at first but you don’t need to use closures if you don’t understand them. It will also bring PHP a lot closer to being a modern programming language. As it stands PHP is just a fluffy C with just as dodgy OOP. It’s great and I love it and don’t get me wrong I won’t write a web app in anything else, it’s just that it’s a bit frustrating writing beautiful JS and Python then having to go back to PHP :-)

I mentioned Debian didn’t I? Here’s a quick tip that doesn’t warrant another post: If you administrate a bunch of Debian servers, look at the apticron package:

apticron report [Fri, 18 May 2007 06:25:09 +0100]
========================================================================

apticron has detected that some packages need upgrading on:

        ganesh.bronco.co.uk
        [ 192.168.0.18 ]

The following packages are currently pending an upgrade:

        xfree86-common 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge4
        libice6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge4
        libsm6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge4
        libxext6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge4
        libxt6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge4
        libdps1 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge4
        xlibs-data 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge4
        libx11-6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge4
        libxmu6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge4
        libxpm4 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge4
        libxaw7 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge4
        smbfs 3.0.14a-3sarge6
        samba 3.0.14a-3sarge6
        samba-common 3.0.14a-3sarge6
        samba-doc 3.0.14a-3sarge6
        xterm 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge4
        xutils 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge4

Sweet yeah? It also goes on to say exactly what the updates contain, which is great. Get it!