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PHP Internals Tackles Non-ASCII Identifiers, PEAR Deprecation, and Base-Function Errors

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In the week of September 2, 2026, PHP internals saw active discussion on three fronts. Luca Rodenhäuser proposed restricting non-ASCII identifiers in PHP after scanning 5,000 Packagist packages revealed over 1,400 such identifiers, mostly in the math-php library, prompting him to split his proposal into diagnostic, well-formedness, and conformance rules. Nick Sdot advanced an RFC to remove PHP's official endorsement of PEAR, citing the package repository as largely broken, spam-ridden, and unmaintained, with only one independent package — Net_SMTP — still actively maintained. Sjoerd Langkemper announced plans to call a vote on making base-conversion functions like octdec and hexdec throw a ValueError on invalid input, framing it as a procedural formality following earlier consensus. Tim Düsterhus pushed back, arguing these functions are commonly used with untrusted input and that throwing from the Error hierarchy — not intended to be caught — would be a poor design choice.

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PHP Internals Tackles Non-ASCII Identifiers, PEAR Deprecation, and Base-Function Errors · ShortSingh