Hi!
I'm not Johannes and I didn't review the proposal in detail yet, but I
think we have enough for 5.3 right now. I'd think we better concentrate
on tying the loose ends and rolling beta out and then moving towards the
release than adding more and more features and never releasing it. 5.3
is not the final release until the end of times, there will be 5.4 etc.
and 6, so there will be ample opportunity to add stuff. And 5.3 has
enough stuff to be released, there's no rush to add more new things,
especially radically new ones. My opinion is that we better take some
time with it and not tie it to 5.3.
I would like to see 5.3 released first before we add really cool
features like this. I'm really +1 for closures but I please for 5.4 and
6.
If I may add my own personal (and biased ;-)) opinion (which may not
count much but I'd like to present the arguments): I'd like to see it in
PHP 5.3. Mainly because of two reasons:
First: My patch is quite non-intrusive, it only adds things in a few
places (new opcode, a few checks). If you only look at the non-generated
files (i.e. excluding files generated by re2c or zend_vm_gen.php), the
patch is actually not even that long:
http://www.christian-seiler.de/temp/closures-php-5.3-2008-06-17-3-redux.diff
Except for the introduction of a 'lexical' keyword I carefully designed
the patch not to have *any* impact *at all* on PHPs other behaviour. I'd
be genuinely surprised if any code breaks with my patch. I also don't
see how this would delay 5.3 - of course things have to be tested but at
least as far as I can tell the major showstoppers currently are class
inheritance rules and namespaces which still cause quite a few headaches
of their own.
Second: If closures are not supported in PHP 5.3, even with the release
of PHP 6 backwards compability will be a hindrance in using them. Since
PHP 6 will have Unicode support and thus quite a few semantic changes,
this will of course not matter much for the actual PHP applications
since these will have to change anyway. But think of class libraries:
There are many things that can be implemented in class libraries where
unicode support doesn't matter at all - such as for example advanced
date and time calculations (beyond timelib), financial calculations etc.
Such libraries will probably want to maintain compability with PHP 5.3
as long as possible. But these libraries may profit from closures.
If you still decide to include closures only from post PHP 5.3, I
suggest to at least declare 'lexical' a reserved keyword in PHP 5.3.
Just my 2 cents...
As to the patch for HEAD: I thought it best to wait for
unicode.semantics to go away along with the if (UG(unicode)) checks
before implementing it (everything else would be a waste of time - since
if I'm not mistaken someone is actually currently removing those). If I
really am mistaken in my interpretation of the discussions here on this
topic and they are not going away (at least not in the short term), I
can of course provide one now (meaning the next few days).
Regards,
Christian
--
PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
