Re: why we must get rid of unicode.semantics switch ASAP

On 21 Jan 2008, at 14:38, Antony Dovgal wrote:

2) it's supposed to mean compatibility, but can be changed only in php.ini, which means users would still have to maintain 2 versions of their software: one for On and second for Off.

I think this is the biggest issue for anyone writing software is the fact that is can only be changed in php.ini — it may well be fine if it can be set on a per request basis (though there will still be issues with that (software libraries that have to cope with both types of request, for example)).

3) 2+ bigger codebase [1] (with lots of duplicates because we have to do same things in native and unicode modes);

From the cross-reference I assume you mean PHP's codebase. We still need binary string support — Unicode is only suitable for textual content. Images, for example, are binary data and we still need binary strings for them. Not everything people deal with in PHP is a textual string. -- Geoffrey Sneddon <http://gsnedders.com/>