Re: "Mission Statement"

On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Zeev Suraski wrote: > 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. Would you want to standardize a feature which works on Linux/ia32, but not on Linux/Alpha? That is reality, as far as I am concerned, and something which we should not simply put aside. > 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. Well, we will have to evaluate the impact of a particular feature and come to a decision on whether it is a valid behaviour which we want to continue or a mere side-effect. Most things in PHP are well understood, but there are some areas (like reference passing) which are neither well- understood (by the users) nor well-defined. - Sascha