Tony Marston wrote on 09/03/2016 10:31:
As a developer who went through several COBOL upgrades I can attest to the fact that BC breaks were extremely rare and only for a good reason. My code was never affected simply because I never used any of the dodgy features (such as ALTER ... GO TO ...) which were removed.
...
I personally started with UNIFACE v5 and move through v6 and v7 without any BC breaks. How was this possible? Because I never used those features which caused problems and were later removed.
OK, so it was not that there were no BC breaks, just that they happened not to affect you, because you weren't using the removed features. So if, to give an example that was recently discussed, you never used PHP's create_function() function, you would be able to upgrade to a version that removed it without any changes. Clearly, this is not the same thing as "never break BC".
This leaves us back with a decision about *which* BC breaks are acceptable, discussion of which includes how many people use the feature, how it will affect them, and what the benefits are in the particular case.
Now, I think it's safe to assume that the example of "var" is something that a lot of code will be using, and I have already said that, in this particular case, I don't think the benefits outweigh the costs. But I come to that conclusion not on the principle of "change nothing", but on the principle of weighing costs and benefits, which I am happy to delve into the details of on a case-by-case basis.
Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP] -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
