Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:80578
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain gmail.com designates 209.85.214.174 as permitted sender)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Sender: morrison.levi@gmail.com
In-Reply-To: <0DD30A0D-E7CA-4150-83E0-8FD46635279C@ajf.me>
References: <CAFMT4NpJxuuqc-wTr1aE4K+wZBT8+04j+9-SsY+nhUMU83fDUg@mail.gmail.com>
	<0DD30A0D-E7CA-4150-83E0-8FD46635279C@ajf.me>
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 10:16:37 -0700
Message-ID: <CAFMT4Nq1X0bONCs=TJyjB1vZ=+UEnX0L8pSex5fWfUMssh4ktQ@mail.gmail.com>
To: Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me>
Cc: internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Remove PHP 4 Constructors
From: levim@php.net (Levi Morrison)

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 9:55 AM, Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me> wrote:
> Hey Levi,
>
> Upon further thought, I=E2=80=99m not super-enthusiastic about this. As h=
as been pointed out, it=E2=80=99s a pretty serious BC break, whether code c=
an be automatically updated or not. PHP 4 constructors may be obsolete, but=
 an awful lot of code uses them.
>
> A better solution, IMO, might be simply to add a deprecation notice. This=
 would make it obvious during development if you=E2=80=99ve accidentally de=
fined a PHP4 constructor, and would encourage migration away from them, but=
 wouldn=E2=80=99t prevent existing code from working.

Possibly. The reality of my position is that I am unhappy about our
current constructor situation. Having `__construct` and only
half-heartedly supporting old-style constructors for the next several
years (maybe ten?) does not sound good at all.

Removing one of the constructors is a nicer end product than fully
supporting both, in my opinion, which is why I proposed dropping it. I
was hoping that a deprecation notice in 5.7 would be sufficient along
with other standard migration tools and documentation, but since we
have decided to not release 5.7 perhaps a deprecation would be better.

At the same time I'm not thrilled about the amount of deprecation
notices that could be generated if this is really as common as people
seem to make it. I generally don't see these older constructors, but
it seems when people have them they have *a lot* of them. I was okay
with this in a theoretical 5.7 release to ease migration because it
had a fixed lifespan of one release cycle but in version 7 it will
stay for the duration of all PHP 7 releases.

What do you guys think?