The advantage of maintaining reverse compatibility is that it helps encourage people to upgrade. Many more people would have many more concerns if the 4 -> 5 upgrade broke programs using depreciated practices. ISPs and hosting companies in particular would be extremely reluctant to upgrade as it would promptly result in several (hundred?) support tickets asking "My code worked yesterday, now it doesn't! What did you do?!!!!!?!!".
I will be honest, I've written the majority of my code in the last year, but am I 100% positive that I'm not using anything that was marked as depreciated in PHP 4? Absolutely not. For all I know I might be using some deprecated function in some arcane, rarely used administrative include file hiding somewhere in the depths of my file system. Everything would apparently keep working when I upgraded, and even for days/weeks after the fact. Then boom, one day something important brakes, and I have no idea why. I would assume that the percentage of people willing to upgrade is directly proportional to the percentage of BC. just my 2cents (canadian). paul On 4/15/05, GamblerZG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Maintaining compatibility between different major versions of PHP must > be extremely hard. Maybe that is obvious, but I do not quite understand > why developers do it. Why PHP 5 has to understand deprecated syntax of > PHP 4? I mean, if someone needs to execute old scripts, they can always > use old engine. > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > -- Paul Reinheimer Zend Certified Engineer -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
