Re: "Mission Statement"

At 01:51 21/11/2000, Sascha Schumann wrote:

On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Zeev Suraski wrote: I'd say that it exists to develop the language specification for PHP period. I don't see how portability or vendor independence have anything to do with it...

    Here is a short explanation for both terms, in the context of
    last week's netmask thread (on zend-cvs).

    Portability:

        The ``hack'' relies on the host platform's long being
        32-bit which makes it non-portable. This particular
        feature and similar ones should not be part of the
        specification.

So I'm not sure I agree about the portability part. Reality is much more important than perfection.

    Vendor-independence:

        I'm certain there are other tricks which are simple
        side-effects of the current implementation.

There could be many things that were born as side effects of implementation, but if they're here to stay, there's no reason to make them a part of the language. It should be possible to implement just about anything under a different implementation as well. At any rate, I guess we'll have to see about this one as time goes by. Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> CTO, Zend Technologies Ltd. http://www.zend.com/