Newsgroups: php.internals Path: news.php.net Xref: news.php.net php.internals:15974 Return-Path: Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm Delivered-To: mailing list internals@lists.php.net Received: (qmail 46112 invoked by uid 1010); 15 Apr 2005 17:03:32 -0000 Delivered-To: ezmlm-scan-internals@lists.php.net Delivered-To: ezmlm-internals@lists.php.net Received: (qmail 46097 invoked by uid 1007); 15 Apr 2005 17:03:31 -0000 Message-ID: <20050415170331.46096.qmail@lists.php.net> To: internals@lists.php.net Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 13:03:44 -0400 User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5 (X11/20040208) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Posted-By: 206.81.46.34 Subject: Yet Another Stupid Question: Why Bother with Compatibility? From: gambler@highstream.net (GamblerZG) Maintaining compatibility between different major versions of PHP must be extremely hard. Maybe that is obvious, but I do not quite understand why developers do it. Why PHP 5 has to understand deprecated syntax of PHP 4? I mean, if someone needs to execute old scripts, they can always use old engine.