What was supposed to be PHP 6 got turned into 5.5 after their attempt at unicode support went south. So now a bunch of folks want the next major version to be named PHP 7 on the basis that the name "PHP 6" has been tarnished.
As a primarily PHP developer right now I honestly don't care what they call it as long as it moves the language forward. But the simple fact that there was a grand debate on the mailing list about something so meaningless and unimportant while important things are ignored is just more confirmation that my decision to begin moving away from the language was the right one.
The PHP working group decided that they didn't want the baggage belonging to the previous attempt to color PHPNG. There's still a lot of articles about the "PHP 6" that never came to be. So they've decided to skip version 6 and go straight to PHP 7.
