The KurtWerks Tinfoil Hat

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2006, Collins Richey wrote:
>On 1/17/06, Bill Campbell <linux-sxs at celestial.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 17, 2006, David Bandel wrote:
>> >On 1/16/06, Kurt Wall <kwall at kurtwerks.com> wrote:
>>
>> >Squirrelmail/HORDE folks, beware.
>>
>> I suspect that the horde folks, having been through this before, may be
>> better off than Joe Average PHP developer.
>
>This average Joe PHP coder found no problems running programs written
>for PHP4 on PHP5. The only "opportunity" I encountered was a
>tightening up of the rules. I can't remember the exact details but one
>of the content management systems had a line of code that was
>guaranteed never to produce predictable results. It was guaranteed not
>to work even on PHP4, but now it's flagged as a fatal error by PHP5.

That type of change I like.  Anything that makes a programming
language more robust, and less prone to errors is fine by me.

ALGOL 60 was the first strongly typed, block structured, language
I used, and it prompted me to add a line at beginning of all my
FORTRAN programs declaring all variables starting with A-Z to be
logical.  This forced me to declare the types of pretty much
everything as FORTRAN would throw errors on logical variables in
most expressions.  Even with 6-character variable names, it was easy
enough to accidentally misspell something which would otherwise
be magically created.

When I started programming in python, I was afraid that it might
allow errors like this as it didn't have anything analagous to
perl's ``use strict'', but python is good about not allowing one
to use a variable that hasn't been previously declared.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
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One man's brain plus one other will produce one half as many ideas as one
man would have produced alone.  These two plus two more will produce half
again as many ideas.  These four plus four more begin to represent a
creative meeting, and the ratio changes to one quarter as many ...
		-- Anthony Chevins