Re: [RFC] Remove PHP 4 Constructors

Hey Levi, > On 15 Jan 2015, at 17:16, Levi Morrison <levim@php.net> wrote: > > On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 9:55 AM, Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me> wrote: >> >> A better solution, IMO, might be simply to add a deprecation notice. This would make it >> obvious during development if you’ve accidentally defined a PHP4 constructor, and would encourage >> migration away from them, but wouldn’t prevent existing code from working. > > Possibly. The reality of my position is that I am unhappy about our > current constructor situation. Having __construct and only > half-heartedly supporting old-style constructors for the next several > years (maybe ten?) does not sound good at all. I agree, it doesn’t. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if we have much choice here. > Removing one of the constructors is a nicer end product than fully > supporting both, in my opinion, which is why I proposed dropping it. I > was hoping that a deprecation notice in 5.7 would be sufficient along > with other standard migration tools and documentation, but since we > have decided to not release 5.7 perhaps a deprecation would be better. > > At the same time I'm not thrilled about the amount of deprecation > notices that could be generated if this is really as common as people > seem to make it. I generally don't see these older constructors, but > it seems when people have them they have *a lot* of them. Yeah, I’m wondering about that. I imagine that a single request would probably result in a massive spew of E_DEPRECATEDs, and that’s not good. :/ > I was okay > with this in a theoretical 5.7 release to ease migration because it > had a fixed lifespan of one release cycle but in version 7 it will > stay for the duration of all PHP 7 releases. > > What do you guys think? I wonder if we could hopefully get rid of them for PHP 8 or something, since it’s deprecated… but then, if we don’t get rid of them now, we might never. I’m not sure, really. -- Andrea Faulds http://ajf.me/