Re: Removal of unicode_semantics

On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 8:34 PM, Tomas Kuliavas <tokul@users.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > We've discussed this a few times in the past and it's time to make a > > final decision about its removal. > > > > I think most people have agreed that this is the way forward but no > > one has produced a patch. I have a student working on unicode > > conversion for the Google Summer of Code and this would help make it > > simpler. > > unicode_semantics=on breaks backwards compatibility in scripts that have > implemented multiple character set support in current PHP setups. > > If setting is removed, instead of maintaining at least some bits of > backwards compatibility and doing some additional work, you force massive > code rewrites in scripts that depend on working charset support and more > work for people, who use interpreter. > > Every time somebody proposes removal of this setting, they claim that > majority agreed on it when there is no agreement on anything. People only > defended own positions and we had other flame about unicode_semantics. It's the lesser of two evils. If the switch stays there, every future-author of libraries/frameworks will have to maintain 2 separate code-bases (one for unicode_semantics=off, other for unicode_semantics=on). On the other hand, 1 year from now it would be safe to require 5.2.1 as a minimal supported version of php, which will allow you to mark all the strings as "binary", which will lead to eaier migration to php-6 -- Alexey Zakhlestin http://blog.milkfarmsoft.com/