Re: "Mission Statement"

On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Zeev Suraski wrote: > At 02:04 21/11/2000, Sascha Schumann wrote: > > 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. > > You have a point there, but since we're not planning to become Java > anywhere in the near future, I think we need to find something in the middle. > I think that documenting platform specific behavior, clearly denoting it as > such, is acceptable. I tend to think of PHP as a high-level language where the properties of the underlying platform are hardly visible. Regardless of that, certain properties should be left implementation-defined. The specification should specify minimal requirements in such cases. For example: An integer can at least represent the values in the closed interval [-(2^31); 2^31-1]. (Note that this is an incomplete example; the real spec will have to say something about what happens when those bounds are exceeded.) Having said that, I think we should keep the "portable" keyword in the Mission statement. Even though some things will be implementation-dependent, the lowest common deminator will be present in definitions like the one above, striving for portability of user scripts. - Sascha