During Dries' 'State of Drupal' talk at DrupalCon, I asked him if there has been any talk about how long Drupal will continue to support PHP 4. I thought of asking this question before the session even began, so it was purely coincidental that Rasmus Lerdorf, founder of PHP, happened to be standing behind me.

The ever-thoughtful Dries made arguments about the number of Drupal users that have hosting without PHP 5.

Someone mentioned proposing an end-of-life for PHP4. Rasmus replied that as application developers, we are in the position to bring about this change.

My argument is that if we are to make full use of newer technologies like web services, things like SimpleXML that are available to use in PHP5 will make the development process much easier.

This seems to be a very serious debate, and I hope that it is considered for Drupal 6. Here are a few posts I've found about this already.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/scatteredsunshine/431651717/

http://rarepattern.com/nodes/2007/03/rasmus-lerdorf...

http://ken.therickards.com/2007/03/23/day-two-morning/

http://willy.boerland.com/myblog/what_version_of_php...