On 25/07/12 16:11, Lester Caine wrote:
Andrew Faulds wrote:
I top you 20 years with 37 years. I was programming in Algol in 1975
( at
Warwick university ). I'm not a programmer, I'm a hardware engineer
who has to
program to make systems work. I added PHP 12 years ago to create web
based
applications to augment c and Pascal based applications. Many of the
concepts
being added make sense only as extensions to the core code, and
don't need to
be forced into general use. Adding tools that have very specialist
use should
be done as options, which we can leave out if we want to. The it
needs to be
justified switching something on by default. I have no objection to
'new
facilities', but only if I can also switch them off ...
Eh, what? "Switch them off"?
What on earth do you mean? "use noGenerators" and then break tons of
third-party
code relying on it? Or do you think you're forced to use them?
The third party code would have to justify using them in my book. But
as long as I KNOW what a library is using then I have the option
simply to avoid it. At the moment how many third party codes are
'strict compliant' and can be used safely with PHP5.4? In my book this
is exactly the same problem. For many years all of my PHP5 code played
nicely with PHP4 installations even though I never used PHP4. Nowadays
you are saying "You can't use this until your ISP updates" - so
libraries NEED to manage this or specifically avoid features that are
not in general use 'in the wild' ... ISP are only just updating to
PHP5.3 since PHP5.4 is not generally available in the core ISP
distributions ... It's additions like this that are delaying adoption
rather than enhancing it.
I don't understand, sorry.
A feature's existence doesn't mean you're forced to use it. Did the
introduction
of short array syntax force you to use [] instead of array()?!
Until one gets thrown into libraries that use 'short array syntax'
exclusively and have to work out what the heck is going on. We don't
get forced to USE it, but we do get forced to ensure that we
understand exactly what it is doing even if we don't and it adds
unnecessarily to the library of functions we need to understand :(
Boo hoo, PHP has new features, you'll have to understand them, shock horror!
Also, PHP5 code playing nicely with PHP4? I'm pretty sure PHP4 had big,
big incompatibilities with PHP5. Although I'm too recent a PHP
programmer to have ever had to deal with that. I've only ever dealt with
PHP5. But I know that PHP4 had pass-by-value objects, and PHP5 had
pass-by-reference, so I'm surprised if PHP5 code works correctly in PHP4.
--
Andrew Faulds
http://ajf.me/
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