Re: [PHP-LANG] "Mission Statement"

At 12:51 AM 11/21/00 +0100, Sascha Schumann wrote:
>On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Zeev Suraski wrote:
>
> > I'd say that it exists to develop the language specification for PHP
> > period.  I don't see how portability or vendor independence have anything
> > to do with it...
>
>     Here is a short explanation for both terms, in the context of
>     last week's netmask thread (on zend-cvs).
>
>     Portability:
>
>         The ``hack'' relies on the host platform's long being
>         32-bit which makes it non-portable. This particular
>         feature and similar ones should not be part of the
>         specification.
>
>     Vendor-independence:
>
>         I'm certain there are other tricks which are simple
>         side-effects of the current implementation.
>
>     While those terms might appear to be obvious, I'm certain
>     that it helps to focus the work's group and to give observers
>     a better understanding of our target.

Sascha,

The idea of writing a spec was so that users know what syntax/semantics 
they can rely on and which not. We thought this would be a nice thing. What 
it should do is describe the current implementation (what we don't consider 
side-effects), AND descriptions of the host platform specific behavior as 
it's part of the language.
I don't want this spec to become a "how we would love to see PHP in the 
future" because then it becomes unusable to the average PHP user who we 
were aiming at.
We could have a special section for future improvements to the language 
(which should be the last thing we work on unless we bump on things while 
writing the spec).
Anyway, I need to go so in short. The main concern in the beginning is to 
cover PHP 4 the way it is today without the side-effects (i.e. try to 
standardize how it can be used and how it shouldn't be used). Anything 
which isn't in the spec is undefined.

And about voting, I don't see how you can do this. We'll need to work with 
consensus. There are random people on this list and the way I see 80% of 
the work to be done in the beginning there's not too much to argue about.
Andi
---
Andi Gutmans <[email protected]>
http://www.zend.com/