Re: [PHP-LANG] "Mission Statement"
[email protected] (Zeev Suraski)
| Newsgroups | php.lang |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
At 03:31 21/11/2000, Sascha Schumann wrote: > I tend to think of PHP as a high-level language where the > properties of the underlying platform are hardly visible. That's an academic view, that's really not too helpful in practice. > Regardless of that, certain properties should be left > implementation-defined. The specification should specify > minimal requirements in such cases. For example: > > An integer can at least represent the values in the > closed interval [-(2^31); 2^31-1]. > > (Note that this is an incomplete example; the real spec will > have to say something about what happens when those bounds > are exceeded.) Well, that's true, but to the average user, saying what's going to work on a 32-bit platform, what's going to work on a 64-bit platform, and what he can always rely on is the best thing. > Having said that, I think we should keep the "portable" > keyword in the Mission statement. Even though some things > will be implementation-dependent, the lowest common deminator > will be present in definitions like the one above, striving > for portability of user scripts. Well, I think that the mission statement should be changed so that it's understandable that the result document would be for the users, and not for Microsoft's compiler team or whatever... Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <[email protected]> CTO, Zend Technologies Ltd. http://www.zend.com/