Synonym request: php5 → php

Question

There are:

• 458 questions tagged php
• 9 questions tagged php5

Of the 9 php5 questions two are closed and none ask for anything specific to PHP5 (There's one comparison with earlier versions question, but it fits fine under php).

The distinction between PHP5 and earlier versions (namely 4) was important in the early days of PHP5 as it employed a completely rewritten engine which introduced quite a lot of compatibility issues. But it's not relevant any more, as PHP4 essentially reached it's end of life in 2008.

I think php5 doesn't make any sense on its own and probably never will, so we should merge it with php. I would have used the "suggest a synonym" thingy, but since php5 is version specific, it's up to the moderators.

I've scanned the popular language tags and I didn't find any other version specific tags lurking around, which is a good thing, we should probably avoid them as most questions that would fit them better than the language tag would probably be off topic.

Answer 1

I merged php5 into php, but opted not to create a synonym for the same reasons they're not synonyms on Stack Overflow: a synonym should be interchangeable, not merely a similar term.

I also went ahead and merged php-5.3 into php, as the questions were being used to say "I'm using this version" instead of "I'm asking about this version," and PHP 5.3 has been out for several years.

• yannis: I think they are interchangeable for questions that are on topic here, which might not be the case for Stack Overflow.
• Thomas Owens: I partially agree with @Yannis, but I'd need to look at all of the questions asked. For the conceptual questions that we expect here, I'm not sure how much the version would matter. By the time you start talking version numbers, you're getting into implementation details and chances are the question should be on Stack Overflow and not here.
• user8: @YannisRizos and Thomas: consider that in a few months, we'll be talking about PHP 5.4 and PHP 6. They're not the same thing as PHP 5.3 or PHP 5: PHP 5, PHP 5.3, PHP 5.4, and PHP 6 are subsets of PHP, but they are not identical to each other, which is what a synonym is meant for. In the past year, we've gotten about a dozen questions with the versioned tags: this isn't a huge problem that requires a synonym.
• yannis: Good enough for me. Appropriate retagging may solve the problem and I can see how a php5.4 tag may be relevant as the version introduces traits and will provide for a few conceptual questions.