Re: [RFC] [VOTE] Deprecate PHP's short open tags, again

On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 11:55 PM Claude Pache <claude.pache@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Le 6 août 2019 à 20:46, Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com> a écrit : > > > > On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 1:34 PM G. P. B. <george.banyard@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > >> The voting for the "Deprecate short open tags, again" [1] RFC has begun. > >> It is expected to last two (2) weeks until 2019-08-20. > >> > >> A counter argument to this RFC is available at > >> > >> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/counterargument/deprecate_php_short_tags > >> > >> Best regards > >> > >> George P. Banyard > >> > >> [1] > >> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate_php_short_tags_v2 > >> > > > > Side-note: Even if this RFC fails, we should probably still make it an > > error to use <? without short_tags being **explicitly** enabled, so that > we > > may flip the default to off at some later point in time. The current > > default being "on" despite their use being discouraged is half the > trouble. > > > > Nikita > > > That would mean in particular that XML documents could no longer be > preprocessed by PHP without boilerplate around its <?xml > ?> declaration.. > I doubt that this is a more acceptable breaking change than deprecating > short_tags. To clarify: What I had in mind is that use of <? results in an error if and only if short_tags is left at its default value (of On). If short_tags is explicitly Off or explicitly On, everything works as usual. Embedding <?xml ?> in PHP code requires an explicit short_tags=Off right now, so the situation there shouldn't change, unless I'm missing something. The only motivation here is to allow us to change the default to short_tags=Off at some point in the future (say PHP 9), after enough time has passed where short_tags cannot be used by default, without explicitly being enabled. We can't just flip the default right now due to the usual code leaking concerns. Regards, Nikita