Re: [RFC] Remove PHP 4 Constructors

From:	Rowan Collins	Date:	Fri, 21 Nov 2014 16:27:52 +0000
Subject:	Re: [RFC] Remove PHP 4 Constructors
References:	1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12	Groups:	php.internals
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Johannes Schlüter wrote on 21/11/2014 16:13:

Hi, On Fri, 2014-11-21 at 16:48 +0900, Yasuo Ohgaki wrote:
How about use INI until PHP8?
No. php.ini needs less settings not more. Especially not for language things. This makes a mess for creating portable code. ze1 compat mode was a fault as were other ini settings we had. Let's not go there, again.

I agree; the runtime environment is not the right scope to set such options. I do wonder if it would be useful to make more use of declare() though, which is scoped to a single file, and could be used like Perl's Pragmas. Annoyingly, unrecognised declare() options issue a warning, so you can't rely on older versions silently ignoring a new flag such as declare(compat_flags=php4_constructors); http://3v4l.org/cikUU Apparently, @ can't be used to suppress the warning, either, since the parser chokes (I guess because declare() isn't really a statement as such): http://3v4l.org/DFBfO I'm not sure it would actually make sense for this case, anyway, but some global behaviours would definitely benefit from being scoped this way e.g. suppress notices in deprecated / 3rd-party code, but show them in your own new modules, or ensure strlen is not over-ridden by mbstring in a library which needs to count bytes. Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]