Re: [SMARTY-DEV] Strict PHP5 Compatibility

--- Ruben Vermeersch <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-09-01 at 17:18 +1000, Robert Amos wrote:
> > The question is, aside from private/protected/public variables and
> > methods, what benefits and improvements would you make to smarty
> > that are php5-only ?
> > 
> > Smarty already benefits from the improved object handles and the
> > speed improvements to foreach(), etc. So what else is there that
> > would warrant a php5 branch?
> 
> Well, i'd mostly drop all backwards compatibility stuff and see where
> it's possible to squeeze out just a little more of smarty, by using
> all the new stuff we got.

Okay, but what? That's the question that I think bok was asking. A few
people (myself included) gave ideas on that topic in the last couple of
months, but nothing that compelling over all. Perhaps it is me -- I
don't yet have a good enough feel for where the strengths and
weaknesses of PHP5's feature set lay but then again, I only have it
installed on one dev machine and there are no specific plans to migrate
our PHP4 setups (both dev and production).

> I'd also prefer error handling based on Exceptions, and the ability
> to use PHP5 with a E_STRICT error reporting set (although PEAR is
also
> very bad in this).

> However, I'm not saying we should branch it right away, I love the
> current state (and who am i to say there should be a branch) and i'd
> like to stay to the HEAD mainline for all development

IMO it is way to early to be thinking of a PHP5 only branch. I'm sure
it will come, but without any motivating reasons, I can't see anyone
spending much time on it. The best thing about the current Smarty is
that it is backward and forward compatible with PHP4/5 so everyone
wins. Breaking BC to support things like private/protected and
Exceptions (which I hear are terribly slow) doesn't really seem like an
advancement in the state-of-the-art to me.

xo boots

> Greetings,
> Ruben