Major changes like ripping the feature that most people are looking forward to
in 5.3 out?
'Most people'? I would've expected 'most people' to be writing code that will run under 5.1 for at least the next couple of years! Experience tells me that takeup of new language elements is slow, and that 'most people' are likely to wait for PHP 5.3.1 or 5.3.2 before upgrading to 5.3 at all, precisely *because* it has a lot of new features.
That E_STRICT was proposed for 6, not for 5.3, and is not a requirement - and
about "double duty", it's not really unintuitive to reference to "members" of
classes the same way you reference to "members" of instances.
Except that it has never been part of PHP syntax. Except that it will make code harder to read/maintain. Except that there are cases where the intention will be ambiguous.
'An announcement has been done on php.net' simply isn't a good enough
reason to screw up the language; we can write new announcements and even
explanations. And we already have *most* of a working implementation in
6.0, so it's not like ripping it out of 5.3 means starting over from
scratch.
I would love to see the public reaction to those "new announcements and
explanations", so in a way it's a win-win situation for me.
I'd love to see the public reaction if we get it badly wrong. I bet that lasts much, much longer than the five minute huff over withdrawal.
- Steph