Re: "Mission Statement"

At 03:31 21/11/2000, Sascha Schumann wrote:

    I tend to think of PHP as a high-level language where the
    properties of the underlying platform are hardly visible.

That's an academic view, that's really not too helpful in practice.

    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.)

Well, that's true, but to the average user, saying what's going to work on a 32-bit platform, what's going to work on a 64-bit platform, and what he can always rely on is the best thing.

    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.

Well, I think that the mission statement should be changed so that it's understandable that the result document would be for the users, and not for Microsoft's compiler team or whatever... Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> CTO, Zend Technologies Ltd. http://www.zend.com/