Posted by Richard Davey on 10/11/05 21:44

Hi,

Tuesday, October 11, 2005, 7:14:05 PM, you wrote:

> Issue: I think BC slows down the evolution of the language. I know
> for sure it makes some people less willing to upgrade. And there are
> ways of avoding unnecessary BC maintenance altogether.

Beyond not staying stuck in the past? Not really. You either code for
PHP4 or you code for 5. If you're really lucky (or just write really
basic scripts) then your code will run on both. If your host doesn't
support 5, they need to wake-up and smell the roses.

Introducing a <?php5?> tag is the wrong way to address it, never mind
being at the wrong end of the pipeline. If you want to control support
from a code point of view, it's not difficult to detect which version
of PHP your running under. But allowing for that through your entire
codebase is just a tad more work, to say the least.

Backwards compatibility doesn't slow down the evolution of a language
- having no users slows down the evolution of a language. And if PHP
was to totally change its language structure on every new version, I
can't think of too many people that would continue using it. The
changes from 4 to 5 are significant, but not overwhelmingly so. I
envisage that change from 5 to 6 will be significantly less of a jump.

Cheers,

Rich
--
Zend Certified Engineer
http://www.launchcode.co.uk

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