From our perspective, you've gone and changed a fundamental data
structure out from under us, in a non-backwards-compatible way, and
broken a whole bunch of working code, for a feature we don't use, and
can't turn off [*]
Supporting unicode requires such change. It is a big deal - Unicode does change the way one thinks about textual information. Text is not a collection of 8-bit integers anymore. But this step needs to be made if we want to be able to write applications that deal with modern environments requiring multi-language and multi-locale support. So PHP 6 is to make this step.
I can always find a host who will do what I want with enough effort,
but a LOT of users will just give up on PHP 6 and stick with 5 (or 4
even) rather than do that...
Maybe. But we have unicode=off option to give them a chance for smoother transition.
--
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829 MSN: stas@zend.com