Re: PHP Language Specification

On Jul 23, 2014, at 1:59 PM, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com> wrote: > On the flip side, there is definitely value in representatives from other implementations > having a voice in changes that affect them, but that could just mean ensuring that members of those > projects are involved within the current framework. In this way, the de facto concept of “PHP” becomes the language specification, rather than any given implementation. All implementors should have input on the direction of the language specification. Again, returning to that idea of thinking “spec first.” We might refer to the PHP Group implementation (sometimes called the “Zend PHP” implementation by other implementations) as the canonical implementation of the specification, but that’s because the PHP Group, which owns the language specification, also owns the canonical implementation. This got me thinking about the whole version number debate. With a language specification, to what does the version number refer? The state of the language specification, or the state of a given implementation of the specification? Right now, the number refers to the state of the PHP Group implementation, and implementations like HippyVM and HHVM say that they are compatible with Zend PHP 5.x. Will we version the language specification separately, and individual releases of various implementations (including the PHP Group implementation) will state that they are compatible with version X of the specification? -Ben