In the recent voting, as was written about in more detail in this article, the most debated features of 'the old' PHP survived yet another minor release. The item 'Remove safe_mode, register_globals and magic_quotes' recieved a total of 14 'against' votes, which is more then enough to keep it from being eliminated from PHP just yet. Though, as rumours tell us, usage of any of these functions will probably result in a DEPRECATED NOTICE (E_DEPRECATED) as of PHP 5.3. Though it might surprise a lot of developers, there is logical reasoning behind it. All of these functions are a part in the current core, and removing them would break Backwards Compatibility big time. There is no alternative to any of these, so they have to stay in, for BC reasons. It is generrally assumed that they will definately not make it into PHP 6. Which, in turn, would make PHP6 even less equal to PHP 5 with Unicode added. Though the talk of Andrei Zmievski is telling us otherwise, which might mean that they will still make it into PHP6, and, with a rapid release of PHP 7, might be dropped no earlier then the 7 release. But rapid releases are really uncommon in OpenSource environments, so this possibility is a lot less likely.

Anyway, for those bad guys who still rely on any of these functions: blessed it be, they will not be removed from PHP 5.3.

~RW