On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 5:10 PM, Richard Lynch <c...@l-i-e.com> wrote:
> On Mon, February 27, 2012 9:37 am, Simon Schick wrote: > > The development of the unicode-as-default-charset should really be > > done > > within the next release coming after 5.4 > > I heared somewhere that it's nearly done ... > > I would have happily seen it in 5.4 but as this release is late right > > now > > we have to wait ;) > > I was off on medical leave for awhile, but last I heard, the one (1) > guy who cared enough to work hard-core on a Unicode PHP realized just > how terribly difficult it was, and just how many irreconcilable issues > it raised, and he stopped working on it. > > Nobody else has taken up the banner, and PHP 6 trunk was moth-balled > and started over, or so I heard... > > That sums up, even over-simplifies, a whole mess of threads, > discussions at conferences, and IRC discussion in a couple > sentences... I apologize to all for the over-simplification, and > possibly outright errors. > > While I understand the allure of writing code in one's native > language, and the ease of having one's native language supported out > of the box in the string built-in type... > > There are mechanisms available in PHP now, which are more cumbersome, > but they work without the very complex issues alluded to in paragraph > 1.. > > Other languages may have this feature, but they were included from the > beginning. Grafting them on to PHP at this point was attempted, and, > as far as I know, failed. It was an ambitious attempt, and the issues > could not have easily been foreseen, so it's probably very > disheartening to have failed just short of the goal line. > > That's the way the ball bounces sometimes. > > Again, please forgive me if I have completely failed to catch > something here, especially as I'm just getting back into the flow of > things. > > some more info http://lwn.net/Articles/379909/ http://www.slideshare.net/andreizm/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-what-happened-to-unicode-and-php-6 so yeah, the full unicode support happened to be too big to undertake (and in retrospective it seems that the UTF-8 would have been a wiser choice instead of UTF-16), and having to upgrade all of the extensions was also a grand task. so the unicode development got halted, which in turn made the whole php6 project into a death march. after some marching 5.3 got branched from 5.2, the stuff ready in php 6 got backported and released, then people realized that it is nowhere else to go, moved trunk to branches/FIRST_UNICODE_IMPLEMENTATION/, and rebranched trunk from 5.3, which in turn get turned into 5.4. ps: and it was a big messy discussion about the namespace operator. ps2: feel free to correct/extend my info. ^^ -- Ferenc Kovács @Tyr43l - http://tyrael.hu
