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Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:31:25 +0100
To: Lukas Kahwe Smith <mls@pooteeweet.org>, internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] prototyping
From: giovanni@giacobbi.net (Giovanni Giacobbi)

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 10:56:01AM +0100, Lukas Kahwe Smith wrote:
> 
> We have worked through the challenge of getting namespaces worked out  
> in 5.3, adding yet another increasingly heavy feature to the syntax  
> would delay us if we really want to make sure we get it right.  
> Screwing up would get us into a world of hurt and to me the main use  
> case we wanted to address was making it easier to define callbacks for  
> our various internal functions.
> 

I was wondering, why don't you simply mark the feature as "experimental", so people that use it know that it might change unexpectedly from one version to another, breaking their scripts. Something similar to the Linux Kernel features approach.

I've never seen this approach used in PHP development process, I've always been seeing the "feature freeze -> support for a long time -> deprecate -> remove in the next major version" approach. Marking a particular language feature as experimental would allow you to drop it or to change it without notice even in a patchlevel release (5.3.1), resulting in a way quicker and more dynamic development process.

The benefits? Nobody (but me...) would install an unstable version of PHP in a production environment, but probably some people would taste an experimental feature included in a stable version.

Just my 2 cents.
Regards,

-- 
Giovanni Giacobbi