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Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2007 07:26:57 -0700
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To: Peter Brodersen <penguin@php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] What is the use of "unicode.semantics" in PHP 6?
From: rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf)

Peter Brodersen wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Jun 2007 02:55:16 +0100, in php.internals
> rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf) wrote:
> 
>> Those same shared hosting companies would never upgrade to PHP 6 if we
>> forced unicode semantics on them breaking legacy apps and that would
>> force us to maintain PHP 5 forever.
> 
> On the other hand I feel a bit sad that if I want to write perfectly
> good portable PHP 6 code that is only intended to work under PHP 6 I
> still have to check for different configuration settings.
> 
> I think we were really close to get out of the
> if(get_magic_quotes_gpc()) "requirement" but now it has been replaced
> with a new one. Even if a developer would write (portable) PHP 6 only
> code.
> 
> 
> Of course, configurations could contain a lot of other obscure
> settings that might have influence on the script but none as
> widespread as the difference in magic_quotes settings.

But this is no different from writing code that will work on both PHP 5
and PHP 6.  The only difference is that instead of checking for PHP 5
you will be checking for Unicode.  Like I said, we don't want the
Unicode decision to be synonymous with PHP 5 vs. PHP 6 because then the
non-Unicode folks will never get the benefits of the non-Unicode
improvements in PHP 6 and we would be forced to support PHP 5 for a lot
longer.  We really stretch our already thing resources in order to
support multiple branches, so anything we can do to get as many people
as possible onto the same codebase helps us a lot.

-Rasmus