Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

There are lot of places in the source code that contains "old" code, pre php 5.
Most notable is the lack of private/protected and public specifier. Stated in
docs/desing.txt:

  - PHP doesn't have "private" member variables of functions,
    so I've used the comment "/* private */" in some places to
    indicate my intent. Don't access things marked that way
    from outside the class def--use the accessor functions (or
    make your own if you need them). Yes, even some globals
    are marked private, because PHP is broken and doesn't
    allow static class variables.

As php isn't "broken" in this way any more, this should be fixed.

On an other note is that there is an extensive use of is_object($var) and $var
=== false, most of those uses I think would be more logical by using exceptions
instead.