On Sep 14, 2014, at 1:24 AM, th317erd wrote:

> I don't know if ANY instance in the history of ANY programming language where 
> moving forward broke things from before. I am sure with enough digging 
> someone could find something here or there...

I agree and hope that new versions of ECMAScript should be backwards compatible 
with old versions. But it's certainly not the case in all languages. As an 
example, practically every new minor version of PHP introduces 
backward-incompatible changes, such as the introduction of new reserved words 
which old code might be using as e.g. identifier names; in fact it seems to me 
that the primary driving factor behind increasing PHP's minor version number is 
in order to introduce a breaking change. Such breaking changes are enumerated 
in the migration documents:

http://php.net/manual/en/appendices.php

I'm not holding up PHP as any kind of example of good language design, just 
wanted to point out that there absolutely are languages whose new versions 
don't necessarily run all old code anymore.  Fortunately I've moved on from PHP 
to node where I hope I won't have to deal with too much of that. (Instead, I 
have to deal with new versions of npm modules that have different interfaces 
than their predecessors, or modules being abandoned and having to find 
replacements that work differently.)

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