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Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2007 01:42:45 -0500
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Message-ID: <200707140142.45543.larry@garfieldtech.com>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP ICU project announcement
From: larry@garfieldtech.com (Larry Garfield)

On Saturday 14 July 2007, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
> > So now there's going to be a PHP-ICU extension for PHP 5 and PHP 6,
> > and PHP 6 will have ICU built-in to such an extent that it's backwards
> > compatible with PHP 5?
>
> Both extensions would be (are being) written in such a way that code
> that worked on PHP 5 would work on PHP 6, with regard to the extension.
> Of course, particular code still could fail for some other reason, not
> related to the ICU extension. I.e. if you call collator_sort($foo,
> $bar), collator_sort being ICU extension function, it would mean the
> same in PHP 5 and PHP 6.
>
> > And what in the world would you do with PHP-ICU extension in PHP 6?
> > I mean, unless you've type-casted a string to binary or whatever, it's
> > already ICU, no?...
>
> I think you are confusing UTF-16 and ICU. ICU is a huge library of
> Unicode text functions, which so far weren't supported in PHP except for
> some collation support. There's a lot of functions to add there. UTF-16
> is just a way to represent text in bits (and ICU uses it, and so does
> PHP 6). The extension would expose a part of ICU functionality to PHP
> users - such as collators, formatters, resources, etc.

So (from another character-set-intricacy-challenged individual), would ICU it 
be analogous to the DOM functions for manipulating XML-like structures?  (The 
methods parentNode(), childNodes(), appendNode(), etc. are all supposed to 
mean the same thing in every language.)

-- 
Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
larry@garfieldtech.com		ICQ: 6817012

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of 
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, 
which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to 
himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession 
of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."  -- Thomas 
Jefferson