Before adding or changing features, please...

Hello, Before adding or changing features, I would like to ask you guys working on PHP core to make sure we are able to test at runtime wether such features are supported. Now that PHP 4 is about to be released, there will still be people that will still stick to PHP 3 despite there are many new and old but improved features. I develop PHP components (scripts, classes, whatever) that many people use. However, I would like to be able to take advantage of the features that were added or changed without compromising the ability to run error free under PHP 3. When the new features only consist of a new set functions that was added, that's fine because we can just use function_exists() to check wether such functions are available. However, when the improved features that are not based on new functions that makes it hard to figure what is available. For instance with the OCI interface functions to fetch rows it is possible to distinguish between a fecth error and the end of rows. However, it is hard to tell in advance if the PHP version currently running a given script is able to do that or not as it was before. So, I just would like to recommend you guys to give a little thought about these details so our components, scripts, application don't have to get stuck with the least common denominator to assure that they still run in the old PHP versions but do not take advantage of newer PHP versions. While I am at it, I would like to ask something else. Certainly, like many of you I have been successfully able to evangelize and convert many "unfaithful" to use PHP even if some of them don't want to do it on anything else than Windows. I don't do PHP programming on Windows, but I know that there are some features that don't work the quite the same way on Windows and on anything else. I just don't know which: crypt()?, popen()? what? That's what I am asking for. If it is not viable to make these features work seaminglessly under all platforms, it would be a good thing for the sake of PHP credibility to know in advance what isn't quite portable by documenting all these difference, if not somewhere else, in a special section of PHP manual. Regards, Manuel Lemos Web Programming Components using PHP Classes. Look at: http://phpclasses.UpperDesign.com/?user=mlemos@acm.org -- E-mail: mlemos@acm.org URL: http://www.mlemos.e-na.net/ PGP key: http://www.mlemos.e-na.net/ManuelLemos.pgp --