Re: "Mission Statement"

At 17:16 21-11-00, Sascha Schumann wrote:

I don't think that a compiler spec is useful, helping Microsoft's .NET (or other forking bodies, like GPL fanatics) team isn't on my agenda either and I don't think that it would be beneficial for the PHP project at all (and I'm sure most people here feel the same). There's theory, and there's reality, and the spec you're talking about is a purely theoretical, useful-for-forking, fairly-useless-for-practical-use type of spec.

    You should not be worried about your investment into Zend.
    The Zend engine will still be the number one choice for a
    long time. If the engine maintains its technical lead, users
    will stay with you and your product folio.

I'm not worried - I don't see the point in aiming at a document that would help forks, though. Forks are not such an unlikely thing to happen (e.g., that GPL fanatic guy that mailed group@ the other day). I'm not really worried about him, but I sure don't want to help him breaking PHP up.

        Can you name me any language which was harmed by a
        standardization effort?

I don't know really, I haven't studied languages history. I know that what the users would want is a user-oriented document, and not a compiler-spec. A compiler spec will probably not be too harmful (even though it'll encourage forks, to some degree), but I agree with Rasmus that this should not be the main concern of this forum.

    I agree with you that diversity of the PHP language is bad.
    That is why I'm here and proposing a standardization effort
    for the language we know as PHP. We cannot prevent forks,
    but we can prevent diversity.

I suggest we give it a start and see how it goes. This usually proves to be the best approach, instead of discussing theocratically in advance... Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> CTO, Zend Technologies Ltd. http://www.zend.com/