Re: [Discussion] Last chance for case-sensitive engine

Hi Francois, On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 8:45 AM, François Laupretre <francois@php.net> wrote: > > I stopped for several reasons : > > 1. The reactions were mostly negative, with a majority of 'breaks much, > brings nothing' opinions, > > 2. Crawling through the code, I discovered that code to handle case > insensitivity was spread all around PHP. Example: I thought that function > and method names could be made case-sensitive by modifying a limited number > of lines of code. Actually, it seems it is handled in a more or less > redundant way in a lot of locations. So, I quickly realized that > implementation would be extremely complex. > > 3. A lot of PHP code is, knowingly or not, using PHP case insensitivity. > > 4. A patch to make PHP case sensitive would be very complex, and providing a > two-mode mechanism still much more. It would require in many cases to > provide another case-sensitive test after each case-insensitive one and > raise an error if both don't match. We must do that because case-insensitive > comparisons are done using a case-sensitive comparison of two strings > previously converted to lowercase. It would also require to store every > class/function/method names twice, as they are currently stored in lowercase > form. As lowercase names are transmitted as strings around the code, it is > very complex to keep the link with the original value. So, to summarize, I > now consider that providing a compatibility 'notice-only' mode is > practically impossible. > > So, while it seemed attractive at first, I stopped working on it. Sounds reasonable. Zend does comparison/conversion various places indeed. "Propose & announce it now, then implement it PHP8" may work. We may get a little simpler Engine for PHP8. Regards, -- Yasuo Ohgaki yohgaki@ohgaki.net