Re: forward compatibility "public" in 4.4

No strong reason. It was meant to help people find var's so that they can be explicit about the access modifiers. This is why it was put in E_STRICT. It's meant to be more helpful and informational messages, and you shouldn't run your website in E_STRICT. Maybe the difference here are the expectations of E_STRICT. I always saw it as a strict standards flag, which is only for the people who are perfectionists. I think it can be useful to some people but I don't mind removing the message. Andi At 10:21 AM 6/15/2005 -0700, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

Andi Gutmans wrote: Personally, I don't think there's a significant benefit to adding support for public. There are so many differences and new features that the gain of just being able to change "var" to "public" would be marginal at best. That said, I don't mind supporting if people think it will help. It's a tiny patch and doesn't break any serious API compatibility except for the downside of not being able to run PHP 4.4 code on PHP 4.3 (if it uses public), which probably defeats the purpose of supporting both PHP 4 and PHP 5. Again though, we can do it... It's no biggy. What was the reasoning again for not having var be a synonym for public in PHP5? It is a bit annoying that a simple PHP4 class using var throws a notice in PHP5 when there is technically nothing wrong with it. -Rasmus