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Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2006 13:24:25 -0800
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] fgets()/fgetss() BC break in HEAD
From: stas@zend.com (Stanislav Malyshev)

> Sorry, I meant to say "Noone with an IQ higher than twelve is relying on 
> this."

PHP Developer 1: Let's change functionality for some widely-used 
function and break BC, because we can and it is so much fun!
PHP Developer 2: You know, breaking BC is not nice, people really rely 
on it and try to write code which works in all PHP versions...
P1: What people, nobody uses this functionality anyway!
P2: I think there might be people using it, we have a lot of developers 
and apps out there now, and the manual explicitly says it works like 
that, so maybe we should leave it alone?
P1: I bet you money nobody uses it!
P2: Here are code examples of real applications using it.
P1: Those people are dumb, we are smart, so we'll break BC anyway 
because we can't care for all stupid people reading the manual and 
expecting PHP to work according to it! They should read the source for 
PHP version they run and figure the stuff out from the source!
P2: So, you say reading manual and programming according to the docs is bad?
P1: Ouch, those bureaucrats... OK, if you insist, you got it - we'll 
change the manual too!
P2: But what about BC?
P1: If you are too dumb or lazy to reread the manual every week - it's 
your fault, you are too dumb to use PHP! Go use C where they keep all 
the stuff back from 70s!

What's wrong with this dialogue?

>> Or change the docs and the variable name to something other than
>> maxchars is a perfect solution. :-)

Yes, you only forgot the part about going back in time 10 years and 
doing it back then :)

-- 
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Products Engineer
stas@zend.com  http://www.zend.com/