[PHP-DEV] A proposal regarding function naming, aliases and such From: Hartmut Holzgraefe (hartmut <email protected>)
Date: 10/20/00

I'd like to re-issue a suggestion i had already brought up
somewhere back this spring regarding function naming and backwards
compatibility:

- add some mechanism to mark functions (and alias names) as 'deprecate'
  or 'experimental'

- add ini options that will generate warnings when using deprecate
  or experimental functions (defaults to 'yes')

- finaly add a third state 'dead'

So whenever a new function is introduced it should be marked as
'experimental' first. Whoever uses theese will be warned that
they might change or even vanish in the future. Introducing the
new shared memory functions like this would have already saved us #
some discussion.

As a second step to get rid of annoying 'backwards compatibility'
aliases and even functions we don't want to support anymore we
mark them as 'deprecate' while leaving them in place. When we
decide to drop them lateron nobody can say that he hadn't been
warned (for people like me who do not really read the NEWS and
Changelog files).

As a final step we might consider to mark a function as 'dead' for
exactly one release step so that people who try a new release and
find their code not working anymore get at least a message like

'Error: the function foo() is no longer supported. It had already
        been marked as 'deprecate' for some time now, so you
        should have been warned!'

While a 'deprecate' function or alias might stay in that state
over more than one release i would suggest a policy to drop old
'dead' entries whenever a new minor release is born. If someone
skips releases from time to time: bad luck!

I have to dig out and reconsider the patches i tried out in spring,
i hope to be able to post my suggestions on monday 

--
Hartmut Holzgraefe  hartmut <email protected>  http://www.six.de  +49-711-99091-77 

Besuchen Sie uns auf der Buchmesse in Frankfurt, Halle 4.0, Stand D 1117 
             und auf der Systems   in München  , Halle  C2, Stand 126

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