Re: PHP6 wiki page

Lester Caine wrote (on 14/02/2014):

But more fundamentally I don't think there was agreement on whether we simply standardise on unicode in the core, or allow a single byte mode? 8 years on, I feel that the amount of utf8 material that is floating around, the easiest route IS unicode only?

The question is not whether to be "Unicode only", it's *how* to implement Unicode. It's not just a case of making all your strings wider, every function that manipulates a string in any way has to be thought through, and every input and output has to be converted to/from whatever encoding is chosen as the internal implementation. While updating the Wikipedia article [1] I came across this slide set [2], which has a fairly decent explanation of the issues and why the previous implementation was abandoned. If somebody comes up with an implementation proposal of Unicode strings, whether to have a mode that doesn't use it can be discussed, but right now there doesn't seem to be such a live proposal. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#PHP_6_and_Unicode [2] http://www.slideshare.net/andreizm/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-what-happened-to-unicode-and-php-6 Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]