Re: Concerning Thies's and Sterling's "Hack"

On Monday, August 25, 2003, at 09:51 PM, Sascha Schumann wrote:

As long as there are appropriate checks and fallbacks, I see no problem using compiler-specific hacks. Especially in cases where it would benefit a large percentage of users.

    Run-time execution time is not everything, otherwise the
    whole world would still be using Assembler for all
    programming.

This is of course a faulty comparison, in that users don't have to change their programming style or language to benefit from this patch.

    Hacks often adversely affect maintainability of any given
    system.  For example, the computed goto hack relies on
    separate definitions of all opcodes.  Failing to keep this
    list up to date can result in subtle, hard to diagnose
    failures which is undesirable for a stable system (PHP 4).

With a robust enough test suite the dangers of this are minimal. George