"Rowan Collins" wrote in message news:56e0025c.5040...@gmail.com...
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.
No BC breaks are acceptable unless it is for a valid reason, such as a
security issue or a performance issue. Changes in fashion are NOT a good
reason.
--
Tony Marston
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