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Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2019 08:34:29 +0100
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To: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com>
Cc: Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Deprecation ideas for PHP 8
From: peterkokot@gmail.com (Peter Kokot)

On Wed, 30 Jan 2019 at 20:51, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 30/01/2019 17:28, Peter Kokot wrote:
> > This now also means that PHP is making its inconsistency a fact
>
>
> The inconsistency IS a fact, and has been for more than 20 years. This
> isn't some new policy, banning something that used to be possible, it's
> a summary of something that's been discussed over and over again, and
> always reached the same conclusion.
>
> The unfortunate truth is that the only way to truly fix most of these
> problems would be to create a completely new language, like Perl6; or at
> least a complete rewrite, like Python 3. As those two examples show, the
> result would be effort and community split between two forks, one that
> runs all the millions of PHP applications already written, and one that
> is theoretically nicer, but runs none of that old code. That just isn't
> a price worth paying.

Sorry, I didn't put my words correctly here. Not inconsistency.
Inconsistency is a fact, yes. I've meant the incapability of doing
something to fix this inconsistency. And it is becoming some sort of
stubborn belief and less and less people want to fix it.

The RFC: Consistent function names [1] shows the magnitude of this. I
don't think every function listed there needs a change so it can be
greatly reduced. But still this can be done in several years to 10
years or so (measuring over the thumb).

Not that it is not possible to do this, but too many people promote
this state as not possible to change. I didn't put too much effort to
make a list of all the changes to an extend as is nicely done in the
RFC but maybe enough would be renaming functions and alias them
properly from major/minor release version to version and furthermore
deprecate the aliases, so they match the pattern suggested for PHP
vanilla functions [2]. Not to mention really good ideas from the past
discussions with namespacing functions and similar approaches...

But, yes... Without proper will or motivation from key people who
could change this it will stay in the inconsistent state and we all
accept it as is. Specially in discussions about a major release where
BC could be done.

[1] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/consistent_function_names
[2] https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/master/CODING_STANDARDS

-- 
Peter Kokot