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Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 17:28:54 +0200
Message-ID: <CAPhkiZz=gYDbHngV+gHhTgW415_KxoCU-31OiW=dxPkPg=tqHQ@mail.gmail.com>
To: Tony Marston <TonyMarston@hotmail.com>
Cc: "internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Remove PHP 4 Constructors
From: narf@devilix.net (Andrey Andreev)

Hi,

On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 5:01 PM, Tony Marston <TonyMarston@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>> But the only benefits with the removal of old features is a smaller code
>>> base for the core developers. The only "benefit" which is experienced in
>>> userland is that applications which have run for over a decade suddenly stop
>>> working.
>>>
>>
>> Ah, so you admit there may be benefits? Again, I do not say that those
>> benefits are definitely enough to justify the change in this case, but they
>> are real, and I would like you to stop dismissing them.
>
>
> There is a big difference if a BC break which causes a minor benefit to the
> core developers also causes a major headache to the millions of developers
> who are the customers, the people who use the language to develop
> applications. The aim should be to eliminate customer grievances as much as
> possible and not to simply ignore them.
>

You continue doing exactly what you were asked not to.

It's not just a "minor benefit to the core developers". It's an
extremely unpopular feature that often leads to debugging nightmares
even for users with enough experience to take on senior development
roles.

PHP 4 style coding is just unknown to the majority of users today and
most people assume that it is no longer supported (or rather, that it
was never supported, because they don't even know it existed). You're
obviously an exception to that, and you might argue that somebody's
lack of knowledge isn't an excuse to break all of your code, but
please stop arguing that a handful of core PHP developers decided to
drop a feature for their own benefit alone. That is simply not true.

Also, I haven't seen PHP4 style constructors used in years and you're
making it sound like every PHP application on the internet uses them -
very far from it.

That being said, it is still a major BC issue and unfortunately we're
not going to have PHP 5.7 where it could've been deprecated, so I
guess being stuck with this feature (but deprecated) in PHP7 might be
the wiser choice.

Cheers,
Andrey.