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Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 13:49:15 -0400
Reply-To: Paul Reinheimer <preinheimer@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Yet Another Stupid Question: Why Bother with Compatibility?
From: preinheimer@gmail.com (Paul Reinheimer)

The advantage of maintaining reverse compatibility is that it helps encoura=
ge
people to upgrade. Many more people would have many more concerns if the
4 -> 5 upgrade broke programs using depreciated practices. ISPs and hosting
companies in particular would be extremely reluctant to upgrade as it would
promptly result in several (hundred?) support tickets asking "My code worke=
d
yesterday, now it doesn't! What did you do?!!!!!?!!".

I will be honest, I've written the majority of my code in the last
year, but am I
100% positive that I'm not using anything that was marked as depreciated in
PHP 4? Absolutely not. For all I know I might be using some deprecated func=
tion
in some arcane, rarely used administrative include file hiding somewhere in=
 the
depths of my file system. Everything would apparently keep working when I
upgraded, and even for days/weeks after the fact. Then boom, one day someth=
ing
important brakes, and I have no idea why.


I would assume that the percentage of people willing to upgrade is directly
proportional to the percentage of BC.


just my 2cents (canadian).


paul


On 4/15/05, GamblerZG <gambler@highstream.net> wrote:
> 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.
>=20
> --
> PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List
> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
>=20
>=20


--=20
Paul Reinheimer
Zend Certified Engineer