> Macromedia will need to address the BC issue or others will
Unfortunately, we all have different definitions of progress. Most of the
things that people have mentioned in this thread - NULL values, strong
typing, etc - are things that go quite a bit against the grain of what CF
does best. If you want to do these things, there are plenty of languages
that do them already. Enough of that sort of "progress", and you might as
well just write Java.
> NewAtlanta has an advantage, here because they do not (necessarily)
> need to worry about protecting an install base of older versions.
I suspect that CF compatibility is just as important for them, since their
marketing seems to be focused on preserving CF codebases by moving them to
other environments where Macromedia doesn't go, such as .NET.
> One way this has been done, historically, with other products, is to
> support both new implementations and prior implementations with
> compiler/interpreter directives -- somthing like:
>
> <cfcompatible version="cf5.0">
> *
> *
> *
> </cfcompatible>
>
> My first impression is that this is ugly & kludgey.
My first impression is the same. I think this would make things needlessly
complex and fragile. The point of CF, in my opinion, is to avoid unnecessary
complexity. Again, I don't want to end up with a Java-alike - if I want to
code in Java, I'll just do that.
> On reflection, though this is exactly the way that they added
> scripting with <cfscript>...</cfscript>
I don't think they're comparable at all. CFSCRIPT was simply a brand new
tag. Pages without that tag would work on new versions of CF just as they
would on prior versions.
> So, they could implement compatibility with tags & the user could
> migrate an old app by simply adding the compatibility declaratives to
> Application.cfm & onRequestEnd.cfm.
I suspect things wouldn't be that simple - there are quite a few tags that,
for internal reasons, can't be started in one file and finished in another.
Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/
phone: 202-797-5496
fax: 202-797-5444
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