Re: "Mission Statement"

At 12:51 AM 11/21/00 +0100, 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.

    Vendor-independence:

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

    While those terms might appear to be obvious, I'm certain
    that it helps to focus the work's group and to give observers
    a better understanding of our target.

Sascha, The idea of writing a spec was so that users know what syntax/semantics they can rely on and which not. We thought this would be a nice thing. What it should do is describe the current implementation (what we don't consider side-effects), AND descriptions of the host platform specific behavior as it's part of the language. I don't want this spec to become a "how we would love to see PHP in the future" because then it becomes unusable to the average PHP user who we were aiming at. We could have a special section for future improvements to the language (which should be the last thing we work on unless we bump on things while writing the spec). Anyway, I need to go so in short. The main concern in the beginning is to cover PHP 4 the way it is today without the side-effects (i.e. try to standardize how it can be used and how it shouldn't be used). Anything which isn't in the spec is undefined. And about voting, I don't see how you can do this. We'll need to work with consensus. There are random people on this list and the way I see 80% of the work to be done in the beginning there's not too much to argue about. Andi --- Andi Gutmans <andi@zend.com> http://www.zend.com/