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To: "Stig S. Bakken" <Stig.Bakken@overture.com>,
 PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 10:32:28 -0500
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Message-ID: <200312151032.28825.ilia@prohost.org>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Regarding the latest patch on fgetcsv() (stable branch)
From: ilia@prohost.org (Ilia Alshanetsky)

On December 15, 2003 05:37 am, Stig S. Bakken wrote:
> So you think the right solution is to dismiss multibyte users and direct
> them to the hacks (mbstring etc) that have been used previously instead
> of thinking ahead?

IMHO calling multibyte a hack would be great disservice to the developers of 
that extension. We don't call ext/pgsql a hack, simply because it's not 
builtin, do we?

> If I were starting a language from scratch today, I would make character
> encoding part of the string "zval" structure.  IMHO that's where it
> belongs.  As an alternative for PHP 5[.1], there is room for a
> "multibyte bit" in the zval that various functions can use to choose
> between "sizeof(byte)==sizeof(char)" and "sizeof(byte) < sizeof(char)"
> implementations.

If you were designing a new language you wouldn't have legacy users who'd 
suffer (significantly) because of features added for other users. 

Ilia