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Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 22:53:34 +0100
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To: Richard Lynch <ceo@l-i-e.com>
Cc: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] bugs.php.net & php 6
From: tyra3l@gmail.com (Ferenc Kovacs)

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On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 5:10 PM, Richard Lynch <ceo@l-i-e.com> wrote:

> On Mon, February 27, 2012 9:37 am, Simon Schick wrote:
> > The development of the unicode-as-default-charset should really be
> > done
> > within the next release coming after 5.4
> > I heared somewhere that it's nearly done ...
> > I would have happily seen it in 5.4 but as this release is late right
> > now
> > we have to wait ;)
>
> I was off on medical leave for awhile, but last I heard, the one (1)
> guy who cared enough to work hard-core on a Unicode PHP realized just
> how terribly difficult it was, and just how many irreconcilable issues
> it raised, and he stopped working on it.
>
> Nobody else has taken up the banner, and PHP 6 trunk was moth-balled
> and started over, or so I heard...
>
> That sums up, even over-simplifies, a whole mess of threads,
> discussions at conferences, and IRC discussion in a couple
> sentences... I apologize to all for the over-simplification, and
> possibly outright errors.
>
> While I understand the allure of writing code in one's native
> language, and the ease of having one's native language supported out
> of the box in the string built-in type...
>
> There are mechanisms available in PHP now, which are more cumbersome,
> but they work without the very complex issues alluded to in paragraph
> 1..
>
> Other languages may have this feature, but they were included from the
> beginning.  Grafting them on to PHP at this point was attempted, and,
> as far as I know, failed.  It was an ambitious attempt, and the issues
> could not have easily been foreseen, so it's probably very
> disheartening to have failed just short of the goal line.
>
> That's the way the ball bounces sometimes.
>
> Again, please forgive me if I have completely failed to catch
> something here, especially as I'm just getting back into the flow of
> things.
>
>
some more info
http://lwn.net/Articles/379909/
http://www.slideshare.net/andreizm/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-what-happe=
ned-to-unicode-and-php-6
so yeah, the full unicode support happened to be too big to undertake (and
in retrospective it seems that the UTF-8 would have been a wiser choice
instead of UTF-16), and having to upgrade all of the extensions was also a
grand task.

so the unicode development got halted, which in turn made the whole php6
project into a death march.
after some marching 5.3 got branched from 5.2, the stuff ready in php 6 got
backported and released, then people realized that it is nowhere else to
go, moved trunk to branches/FIRST_UNICODE_IMPLEMENTATION/, and rebranched
trunk from 5.3, which in turn get turned into 5.4.

ps: and it was a big messy discussion about the namespace operator.
ps2: feel free to correct/extend my info. ^^

--=20
Ferenc Kov=C3=A1cs
@Tyr43l - http://tyrael.hu

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