Tomas Kuliavas wrote:
>>> Hoepfully this project will learn something with the previuos
>>> experiences ( PHP5 adoption anyone? ) and think in a reasoanble
>>> backward compatibility policy.
>> This is a different story: From what I'm reading Unicode support is for
>> many people way more interesting than many things introduced with PHP 5.
>> ("syntactical sugar")
>>
>> And another thing: I'm currently creating some statistics about PHP
>> versions used to run average applications since these statistics from
>> netcraft pinging hosts are nice but they don't show which of these hosts
>> are really used and where new software is being installed. Currently my
>> statistics aren't really significant but show PHP 5 usage > 60% (PHP 5.2
>> is around 50% of all used versions) with an average application - I'll
>> post all information about that once I trust the statistics more (more
>> data...)
>
> München has been selected for nuclear test site. There are only 1332650
> people in this town. It is less than 0.03% of the world's population.
> Please relocate in next 24 hours. :)
>
> You will like decisions based on statistics only when you are on the right
> side of statistics table.
>
> PHP 5.x has some nice features, but these features can't justify increase
> in minimal PHP requirements.
Unicode support is a rather major milestone for PHP. It is one of the
biggest changes to the codebase ever. I don't think anybody can
seriously argue that decent Unicode support isn't worth the effort and
it is somewhat unrealistic to think that this can be done while keeping
it perfectly backward compatible to code written for PHP 4 released 7
years ago.
We have tried very hard over the years to make sure we keep backward
compatibility much to the chagrin of a lot of people. Many people think
we should make a clean break from some of the legacy features of older
versions while others think we need to be backward compatible above all
else. This is a balancing act where we think long and hard before
making changes that can break old code, but in order to advance
sometimes there is no way around it.
Even with Unicode we recognize that there will be people who simply
don't care about it and they would rather that their legacy apps just
worked while still being able to use the latest PHP version. Hence the
binary string support in PHP 5 and the unicode.semantics toggle in PHP 6
which will allow people with legacy code to still migrate to PHP 6 and
hopefully allow us to phase out maintenance of older versions a bit
quicker than if we didn't have a migration path for people. Maintaining
multiple branches of PHP is a very tedious job for us.
-Rasmus
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