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Date: Sun, 4 May 2008 20:52:03 +0400
To: "Tomas Kuliavas" <tokul@users.sourceforge.net>
Cc: internals@lists.php.net
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	 <48988.78.61.224.253.1209918881.nsm@avilys.eik.lt>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Removal of unicode_semantics
From: indeyets@gmail.com ("Alexey Zakhlestin")

On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 8:34 PM, Tomas Kuliavas
<tokul@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> > We've discussed this a few times in the past and it's time to make a
>  > final decision about its removal.
>  >
>  > I think most people have agreed that this is the way forward but no
>  > one has produced a patch. I have a student working on unicode
>  > conversion for the Google Summer of Code and this would help make it
>  > simpler.
>
>  unicode_semantics=on breaks backwards compatibility in scripts that have
>  implemented multiple character set support in current PHP setups.
>
>  If setting is removed, instead of maintaining at least some bits of
>  backwards compatibility and doing some additional work, you force massive
>  code rewrites in scripts that depend on working charset support and more
>  work for people, who use interpreter.
>
>  Every time somebody proposes removal of this setting, they claim that
>  majority agreed on it when there is no agreement on anything. People only
>  defended own positions and we had other flame about unicode_semantics.

It's the lesser of two evils.
If the switch stays there, every future-author of libraries/frameworks
will have to maintain 2 separate code-bases (one for
unicode_semantics=off, other for unicode_semantics=on).

On the other hand, 1 year from now it would be safe to require 5.2.1
as a minimal supported version of php, which will allow you to mark
all the strings as "binary", which will lead to eaier migration to
php-6

-- 
Alexey Zakhlestin
http://blog.milkfarmsoft.com/