On December 15, 2003 05:37 am, Stig S. Bakken wrote:So you think the right solution is to dismiss multibyte users and direct
them to the hacks (mbstring etc) that have been used previously instead
of thinking ahead?
IMHO calling multibyte a hack would be great disservice to the developers of
that extension. We don't call ext/pgsql a hack, simply because it's not
builtin, do we?
The extension is virtually a hack. Again, the developers of mbstring had to choose the option, adding support for multiple encodings to PHP by separating it as an extension, instead of integrating it into the core implementation because we always ought to manage backwards compatibilities.
If I were starting a language from scratch today, I would make character
encoding part of the string "zval" structure. IMHO that's where it
belongs. As an alternative for PHP 5[.1], there is room for a
"multibyte bit" in the zval that various functions can use to choose
between "sizeof(byte)==sizeof(char)" and "sizeof(byte) < sizeof(char)"
implementations.
If you were designing a new language you wouldn't have legacy users who'd
suffer (significantly) because of features added for other users.
Well, the legacy users of PHP4 will significantly suffer for PHP5's new features.
Moriyoshi
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