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Changes In Store For PHP V6
An anonymous reader sends in an IBM DeveloperWorks article detailing the changes coming in PHP V6 — from namespaces, to Web 2.0 built-ins, to a few features that are being removed.
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No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
... for those too lazy to RTFA:
Additions:
Better Unicode support
Namespaces! (this is being backported to PHP 5.3)
SOAP and the XML Writer/Reader modules compiled in and enabled by default (also in PHP 5.3)
Removals:
magic_quotes, register_globals, register_long_arrays, safe_mode
ASP-style short tags ()
Freetype1/GD1 support
ereg (use of preg encouraged instead).
I would think swapping mysql for XML would make things run slower on the whole, especially large databases, but I'm not an expert in that field. XML and mysql really serve different purposes, and I don't think replacing mysql with XML would be a good idea for the vast majority of use cases.
Oh, and what happened to the spiffy discussion2 stuff? Now comments open in new pages again and I can't reply inline. What's up with that?
All your base are belong to Wii.
Especially since most of the "new" features are either already available or will be included in v5.3. There's literally nothing new here except better Unicode support.
Developers: We can use your help.
i am servicing around 350+ clients in a small fish web host. even at that small web host, there are a phletora of different scripts, programs that clients are using to conduct their everyday business, their estores, their livelihood. some of them are dependent and locked-in to the software they are using like a small business company that extensively uses ms products is locked into microsoft.
regardless, backwards compatibility is important for those people. for starters, these are the people who have chosen php as the platform to conduct their business on, making php a de facto dominant language for the web instead of being a small time web language that was used on web savvy, webmasters. the financial impact of this is going to be huge for them, to adopt to that many changes php dev group started to introduce in the span of 1 to 2 years. this is too much.
you gotta slow down. or you are going to alienate the small business community from using php with what you are doing. if you break a small estore owner's store script every 1.5 years for 'upgrading', the second time you do it they will jump the language ship.
do not start to become an elitist group out of touch with the people, increasingly caring for nifty programming issues rather than what would the users think.
Read radical news here
Full Tilt
No.
XML is a format designed to transmit data between machines, not for data storage.
Imagine a 50 gigabyte database. I have one.
Now imagine the same database in XML.
The size would explode and you suddenly have to seek the entire db for a simple select.
It was to protect you from the O'Malleys and O'Connors. The PHP framers were obviously fans of Mel Brooks' film, Blazing Saddles: "We'll take the niggers and the chinks but we don't want the Irish". Or I'm missing something.
THL phish sticks
I simply can't wait for an even bigger php.ini file to support disabling and re-enabling of deprecated functionality. I've spent several evenings over the last few weeks on a contract to clean up some really bad PHP code, and a good fraction of that time has been spent actually getting a test bed up and running, trying to match the Win32 PHP 5 install I'm forced to work with the Linux PHP4 install on the production server. More than ever before I'm convinced that PHP is the worst major language ever invented, and I'll wager PHP6 only makes it worse.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Make it like a modern language.
Change . (string concat) to +
Change -> (pointer-to-member operator) to .
Done. Huge productivity increases.
Thank you.
Um, no it's not. It's only downfall is that it's too easy to do powerful things so idiots make dangerous code.
That is not the language's fault. Not everyone wants or needs a JBoss server or something equally silly for their website. PHP is still very good. Safe programming in PHP just needs to be preached more to the new users of PHP and some of the self taught people who perhaps learned off the net from someone else with little experience rather than a book since all books I've seen cover the basics on safety.
The only thing that annoys me is the fact it's function naming methods aren't consistent. It shows that it's had input from various places without any thought into standardizing things.
They've fixed a lot of things that were being complained about under the terms "why php sucks" http://www.google.com/search?q=why+php+sucks . ::\/\. /> :-)
Related news is that PHP runs much better now on Windows Server 2008, as per the official Zend statement. But I doubt we will see too many people switch to WISP. This is flambait, agreed.
Also if you now have a PHP-fed brain with no place for anything else, with the new namespaces-on-steroids (http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.namespaces.using.php) change, you'll likely port slashcode to
And otherwise refer to <things like="this"
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.
Don't be daft, PHP 5 is a solid language and it doesn't take much to learn how to write secure code. If you view it from a rookies point of view it could be dangerous, but that doesn't magically make the language crap in the hands of more experienced developers.
"and a bunch of stuff removed"
The stuff addressed are some of the widest security holes. On top of that the old way of programming PHP and most guides out there encouraged the usage of these bad functions, getting them totally removed is a huge step forward.
Beyond that, and the pervasive "make it easy to do the WRONG thing" un-philosophy, I still haven't heard about it getting lexical scope, closures, and anonymous functions. Of course, this only matters if you're a good programmer (as opposed to merely a Decently Adequate one).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I've noticed that every single article here mentioning PHP is immediately tagged 'phpsucks'. I find PHP incredibly expressive and am always surprised by the incredible variety of libraries/modules/plugins to manipulate graphics, flash, pdfs, to support protocols like SOAP, JSON, etc.
Perhaps we need an article on 'why php sucks' ?
They are removing some things. According to Splab, above, removing these things is a huge step forward. More importantly, removing things should always be a major release. They are breaking backwards compatibility with everything that uses the things that they are removing.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
My biggest issue with new PHP changes is fact that the sheer size of the PHP libraries mean that these new features don't bubble through to the whole core.
For exmaple take the newish try / catch exception features. On first glance you think "finally I can write decent exception handling into my own code" - which is great for your own exceptions but too many of the core functions used by your code or by a framework you're using don't throw exceptions - they indicate an error codition in the function's result.
So now we're seeing loads of code out there by people trying to do things "The right way (tm)" but it's full of bugs as there's exception conditions being raised by core functions that don't get caught by the catch blocks.
The line from TFA that concerns me is "Much improved for PHP V6 is support for Unicode strings in many of the core functions"
Many? That will means developers will start using unicode only to find scattered lines of code throughout the app doesn't work as the core function it uses doesn't support unicode. The overhead of keeping track of which functions do and don't support unicode will be a nightmare.
Unicode support is reported to become available for 5.3+ later as a module.
What I've heard the developers say, basically, is that there is no real roadmap for 6.0, since 5.3 has most of the planned features and unicode (the big new thing) will be available sometimes, although not built-in.
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
What makes PHP nice is that, language-wise, it is basically C plus a subset of C++ wrapped up in a scripting language. Almost any code written in C (or C++ without templates/exceptions/other icky stuff) can be trivially ported to PHP by replacing the type names with "var" and adding dollar signs in the right places. (I'm exaggerating slightly, but not much.)
PHP doesn't have any weird syntax like Perl regular expressions---you can do Perl regex, but it is neatly encapsultated into proper strings the way it should be. There's no having to manually re-indent dozens of lines of code because you needed to add another nesting level and whitespace is part of the language, etc. It's just a really clean, lightweight OO language that's exceptionally easy to learn and happens to integrate very well with HTML.
Don't get me wrong, PHP has plenty of weak points when it comes to performance (particularly when dealing with massive complex data structures), availability of modules to do various obscure things, etc., but as a language, it is pretty nice, IMHO---mainly because it isn't a kitchen sink like Perl.... :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
That's pretty unfair circumstances under which to judge any language.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Did you have to shower after writing this? Did you at least burn the keyboard?
how to invest, a novice's guide
Try doing a search on Dice.com, where they post jobs. ASP.Net Developer returns 3626, while PHP developer only returns 1514 jobs. That's less than half. So while PHP may be used by tons of hobbyist coders (I use it myself), ASP.Net is used much more in the business world.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That's the problem with PHP. It requires all the hard work of writing C-like code, without any of the benefits that one might chose C for.
PHP doesn't have any weird syntax like Perl regular expressions---you can do Perl regex, but it is neatly encapsultated into proper strings the way it should be.
Interesting example of PHP superiority. Perl regular expressions are delimited with / (or another character) because it's part of the language syntax. But if your regular expression is encapsulated in a string, there's no longer a need for it (which would simplify things since you don't need to escape it). Yet the pcre functions use a delimiter. Monkey see, monkey do. Without knowing why.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
First of all, if you don't re-indent your after adding another nesting level, you are making your code hard to read, and if I have to work on it after you, I will hate you for it. This is one of the reasons that Python is so pleasant. It forces people to write decent code.
Secondly, if you're manually indenting each line of code, you should start using a modern text editor.
...He took the "contract." Nobody was forced.
But his post is inane.
Isn't it about as basic as it gets that code (outside of Java) should be developed on the same platform that it will ultimately be deployed upon?
If he had done that, all he'd have needed to do was get a copy of the binary as compiled for use on the production server, and their php.ini. Install, copy in the php.ini, and he's up and running in an environment identical to the Prod server.
Barring that, if he'd had gotten their php.ini anyone w/ any PHP experience would be able to see what non-std components were included, and the version everything is running at. Download it, compile it, install, and copy-in the php.ini.
If he's spending a "good fraction" to get a "test bed" then he really should stick to tech support or network administration or whatever he's done over the past few years full time for a living.
I use Kate. Click & drag to select a large chunk of text, then tab/shift+tab to indent/unindent it. Trivial.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I do want a certain amount of control over the structure of my code, even if a lot of it will be by convention. Having any automated tool try to "fix" someone else's code is likely to screw up things like comments which are cleverly indented and aligned with some code, or similarly interesting code.
And an IDE is overkill in many other ways, yet they still often find ways to miss some functionality I want. That, and I tend to be much more easily able to switch text editors than switch IDEs.
Disclaimer: I'm not GP, and I use Ruby.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's the only way to be sure.
how to invest, a novice's guide
OO? Only recently.
Clean? Not even close, not when you've used a real OO language. and happens to integrate very well with HTML. So does everything else, now. I'd argue Ruby is actually better at this than PHP. Don't get me wrong, PHP has plenty of weak points when it comes to performance My language of choice right now is Ruby, so I don't really care about that. availability of modules to do various obscure things Considering the amount of crap built-in to the language, I doubt that's a huge stumbling block, either. I like CPAN, but it does help when the language itself is clean enough that I'll happily write a library of my own. But most that I'd need to do with a C library has bindings everywhere I really want to do it. mainly because it isn't a kitchen sink like Perl I think Perl has too many built-in functions, available everywhere, completely un-namespaced, compared to Ruby.
But you know what? Perl has a little over two hundred functions in the main namespace. PHP has a little over three thousand, according to this page.
So, it may not have the kitchen sink in the syntax, but it has the kitchen sink, the bathtub, the plumbing, and the neighbor's shower in the core library.
Finally, I call BS on this: Almost any code written in C (or C++ without templates/exceptions/other icky stuff) can be trivially ported to PHP by replacing the type names with "var" and adding dollar signs in the right places. (I'm exaggerating slightly, but not much.) Is there a language, other than Python, that this isn't true of, for very simple, "Hello World" or "My first HMAC implementation" examples? Sure, the rules would be different, but dropping all the type declarations (swapping for "var") and adding dollar signs is significant.
Oh, and does PHP support structs? What about function pointers? I doubt it's "almost any code". It's easy when you understand both C and PHP, but again, I assert that's true for many languages, particularly popular web scripting languages.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Honestly, any IDE worth it's salt has by now solved the auto-formatter problem.
It's a by-demand feature so it's not like Word AutoCorrect. And you should be able to use a nice WYSIWYG editor to build the rules.
This is what you get, for example, in Eclipse and Visual Studio.
Personally, I like things like integrated FTP, integrated subversion, integrated unit testing, and, most of all, an integrated server-side debugger w/ all expected function: breakpoint/play/step control, stack and heap manipulation, etc.
All of these are possible using a text editor, but you need 5 different applications and none of it works together.
Not to mention: INTELLISENSE and DATA TYPE DISCOVERY! (on a loosely typed language that's a big help).
Instead of having to basically memorize or manually lookup class names, method names, and method arguments, I just begin typing the class name, use some arrow keys, and be done w/ it.
Anybody using an IDE w/out these features is fine by me, but for good measure they really should bill a customer less than those of us do that are using these tools.
You're deliberately handicapping your productivity. The customer shouldn't pay for that.
While I agree with your point let's not forget that it can be all things to all people. M0n0wall (and forks like PFsense and FreeNAS) uses PHP for shell scripting like startup and configuration scripts which I thought was pretty cool.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
Something like *Tidy is all you need if you don't feel like using some fancy text editor or are too lazy to configure your editor.
http://perltidy.sourceforge.net/
http://rubyforge.org/projects/tidy
http://tidy.sourceforge.net/
etc
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
First, the PHP code doesn't really make sense. Why are you passing in the $args parameter?
All this code is doing is accepting a method name, validating it as valid (yes, an Enum dt would help here), and returning it if it is.
In which case, this is much better:
if (is_callable($method)) {
return method;
}
Or, more on point, you'd never even call the __call() method, you'd just call is_callable().
I think the point is to show a plausible example of PHP being "hard work like C."
I'm not a PHP apologist. It's got a lot of problems. Chief among them a glaring inconsistency that just makes an elegence-loving guy like myself cry my eyes out. But to say that it's "hard work like C" just because it retained a syntax and offers up some thin wrappers around C functions is, I believe, disingenuous.
Well, at least the sample code has clearly been written by a PHP expert. For example, a newbie would write something like
and get paid for just three measly lines of code.
Thank $deity Nathan A. Good (mail@nathanagood.com), Senior Information Engineer, Consultant stepped in and corrected this to
Go, consultant-written code, go!
Loose typing and non-strict syntax in general is particularly well suited to the internet because each request generates a completely new environment. Something that was wrong with the previous request, unless specifically stored, doesn't affect the next request. Strictness in programming stems from the need to keep far flung parts from affecting each other; the web is modular by nature and thus resistant to wide spread bugs. Thus, loose typing and other, less strict forms of programming that make life easier at the expense of fragility is counterbalanced by the modular nature.
Many won't agree with that analysis, and that's fine. Sloppy coding has gotten more than one web project in trouble, and more than one feature of PHP's that was intended to make life easier ended up going to far and introducing security holes. But that doesn't change the simple fact that PHP was made for the web and has conveniences built into the core that other languages either don't have or require an add on for.
I've worked with PHP professionally, building a healthy, heavily profitable, and rapidly growing company providing information management services to schools.
.NET wished to be, only cross-platform. It's an excellent tool for developing information-processing applications, very, very rapidly. Yes, it has its weaknesses, and nobody's forcing you to use it, and the devs are working on the weaknesses, too. Go use Ruby if it makes you feel good. But PHP works well on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, and many others. Seriously: you really can't go too wrong betting on PHP unless you need 3D graphics!
From the simple standpoint of "concept to implementation" - PHP ROCKS. It's very, very fast, requiring little in the way of "planning" and "structuring" while letting the features come out... FAST. It is, bar none, the best RAD environment I've yet worked with. Not that it's the best in every area, but that it clearly has the best balance between features and "gotchas". It has its weaknesses, such as lousy error reporting, but even that can be largely mitigated with a little intelligence in advance. But it really does have a number of key strengths that I leverage to the hilt:
1) Stability. It just doesn't die. Ever. I've never, ever, ever had a problem with PHP "not working". I don't troubleshoot it. It's there, it works, and I don't sweat it.
2) Scalability. It's "share nothing" approach makes clusting and random-host selection boil all the way down to a simple session manager. Having 1 or 10 application servers running side-by-side is almost trivial!
3) Code density = excellent! It's a fairly dense language, meaning that lots can get done in a few lines. Just for giggles, I've written a self-forking, multi-process daemon with a process manager and hundreds of managed children forks performing a deep-level network scan in like 50 lines!
4) Security. Yes, you heard me correctly. Although you can certainly use PHP "wrong", you can also use it "right". Once you do, you discover that PHP has a number of features that make things like SQL injection and shell parameter expansion a thing of the past. Really. Learn your tools!
5) Flexibility. You can run it as a module inside Apache. You can run it as a standalone executable. With tools like Ion Cube and PHP-GTK, you can create a cross-platform GUI application without revealing source.
6) Availability. Any $5/month web hosting company supports PHP, and there are many free ones, as well. You can download a CD, install Linux, and have PHP/Apache up and running in under 10 minutes. There are batrillzions of apps available A LA SourceForge for free. PHP is the most commonly available web development language. And, by no means is it a web-only development language!
Sorry you can't handle a few quirks in the function names. (so write out a file of wrapper functions - DUH!) Sorry that it's attempts to simplify variable management weren't perfect. Geez. Just code in c and be done with it, why don't you?
In short, PHP is everything that VB and
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Personally, I like things like integrated FTP, integrated subversion, integrated unit testing, and, most of all, an integrated server-side debugger w/ all expected function: breakpoint/play/step control, stack and heap manipulation, etc.
The debugger is the only thing I miss from a "real" IDE.
Subversion is garbage, of the "at least it's not CVS" variety. There are at least some ten or twenty distributed version control systems out there, at least one of which has got to work well for you.
FTP is garbage. Use anything else. Yes, anything else.
These are actually related. I don't really like most of the stuff you mentioned "integrated", as that usually means things like "I have a keyboard shortcut to run unit tests!" Great, but I'm comfortable on the commandline. Let me switch between my editor and terminal easily, and I'll run unit tests, run a development server, and anything else I feel like.
The other reason is that I can then switch to pretty much anything else without having to switch IDEs. I know just about everything is supported on Eclipse, but "just about" isn't everything. I don't have to choose between Git and Subversion -- I can use bzr, hg, darcs, or really whatever the fsck I want. I don't have to use FTP because it's got the prettiest interface -- I'm just as comfortable with scp -- or, when it makes sense, Capistrano -- I can even use things like KDE's fish GUI for ssh.
All of these are possible using a text editor, but you need 5 different applications
Yes, that's the Unix Way.
and none of it works together.
Wrong, wrong, WRONG!
All of it works very well together. On the occasions where it doesn't, I can hack together the glue require reasonably quickly, and be back to being as productive as I was before -- but these cases are also times when an IDE wouldn't be able to work with them at all, and I know a lot more about hacking together scripts (shell and similar) than I do about writing Eclipse plugins.
Not to mention: INTELLISENSE
Useless, unless it's linked to documentation. And then, still useless, compared to flipping over to my browser and asking Google, since I probably don't actually know what I want there.
Not that I would be against having it, but I'm not willing to fire up Eclipse (and burn all my RAM, and still have it be sloppy and inaccurate due to being a dynamic language) just for Intellisense.
And then there's workspace management, and keeping plugins in sync, and dealing with when plugins go bad -- can't start Eclipse until I figure out which plugin is making it crash, or, more likely, wipe it and reinstall from scratch -- and it'll autodetect the file as the wrong type, so now I have to go fuck with its filetype associations, and set keyboard shortcuts -- whoops, the shortcuts I want aren't there...
There's a whole new level of bullshit I'd have to deal with if I was using an IDE. I know, I was for awhile.
and DATA TYPE DISCOVERY! (on a loosely typed language that's a big help).
If I understand this, it might be a help if I had functions so massive I can actually lose track of a variable, or if you're talking about the whole built-in debugger feature.
Instead of having to basically memorize or manually lookup class names, method names, and method arguments, I just begin typing the class name, use some arrow keys, and be done w/ it.
Except that by the time I'm doing that, I probably want to know more about it. For example: Is this indexed from zero, or one? How do I create a has_many relationship with an order clause? Does that have to be a string, or can it also be some other cool data structure?
Let me know if you find an IDE that can handle Intellisense in Ruby and actually make me more productive.
Oh, also, a fair amount of what you're doing probably should fit in your head. If you're not doing PHP and needing to know things like mysql_real_
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Better Unicode support, which is a major, desirable feature, as others pointed out, and as far as I know, magic_quotes won't be deprecated in 5.3. Just deprecating magic_quotes, the last piece of shit to get rid of (the other two were register_globals and safe_mode) justifies a new major version giving PHP a refreshed image. They finally got rid of three of the worst features ever thought in a programming language other than COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, RPG and similar crap.
Now they need to get rid of the fatal error on function redefinition or function not found stupidity (that was REALLY retarded, probably the single worst feature after the three I mentioned), lexical scoping, syntax for lambda-expressions, first-class functions, better garbage collection, true object-orientation, a decent class system (i.e. one that's not modelled after Java's), operator overloading, associative arrays with support for non-string keys, decent iterators which don't require you to define 235789051 methods - just one (next) as a minimum, generators, coroutines, threads, a decent eval without the return insanity, and functional programming tools. Oh, wait, they need Python!
On top of that, I'd get rid of statements (make all of them expressions), add guaranteed tail-call elimination and get rid of the dollar sign.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
Each time I read that they're ditching safe_mode, I do a little happy dance and shed a tear of delight.
All the other stuff is great as well, but safemode has made the quality of my life significantly worse in the past.
What if you want to append a number to a string? Given that standard C doesn't support overloading, would you have to write a new *differently-named* method? It'd be a nuisance to have to keep track of all the different methods when (e.g.) PHP can simply do the whole lot using the '+' operator. it's a scripting language, it makes no sense to resemble C in any respect. Wrong; it makes perfect sense to use C-style syntax. That's almost certainly the most common syntax by far, used as it is in C++, Java, JavaScript, C# and many other languages.
Visual Basic's syntax is different, and I had to learn this all over again when I used it for the first time, because I'm used to C-influenced languages. The mental context switch required and my tendency to keep inadvertantly using C-style syntax (leading to syntax errors) is a PITA.
I wouldn't mind if the VB syntax was nice to begin with, but it's not. It's inelegant and clunky; probably not bad considering it was derived from BASIC, but still inelegant and clunky. It probably got that way because it mutated from BASICs MS-DOS/PC programmers were familiar with, carrying them along with it. However, if (like me) you're not already used to that flavour of BASIC and haven't even used BASIC for years, it's not easy to use at all. It's not even that much like the old BASICs I used to use. Though this is getting away from the main point...
There may be valid reasons for using a different syntax, but those should reflect underlying differences in the structure/approach of the language (even Perl syntax is somewhat C-flavoured in various respects). However, using a fundamentally different syntax just for the sake of it is a Bad Idea. PHP is easier to use because it has a C-derived syntax.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This attitude - that new versions of the language should always support everything the old versions supported - only makes sense if you assume that the initial design was perfectly sound to begin with.
Had PHP4 been perfectly designed, and perfectly well-suited to what people are now using PHP for, there wouldn't be any need to change it at all. But PHP isn't perfect. They've found ways to make it better. They could fork off a new project containing those changes - but PHP6 is more like PHP5 than not - and if they had to fork off every time they changed things around they'd have a lot of extraneous extra names for basically the same thing.
Also consider - how much time and effort might they have to put in to augmenting PHP6 to be fully backward-compatible, and to maintain that awkwardness - even in the face of new features that may flat-out contradict older policies in the language? How much work would have to be wasted just to make PHP6 a better PHP4 than PHP4 is?
If you wrote your code for PHP4, just keep running it on PHP4 until you're ready to port it.
Bow-ties are cool.
There was actually a lot of resistance to Unicode in Japan: there were some unfortunate misunderstandings early on that led a lot of Japanese people to believe that Unicode was trying to force them to use Chinese conventions for character shapes. It also doesn't help that all the various UTFs appear to be less efficient at encoding Japanese than their various legacy encoding systems. (Of course, neither of these things is really an issue in practice, but we're talking about popular perception here!)
I don't know if Matz was among those who held those incorrect beliefs, but even if he wasn't, there still won't have been any compelling reason for him to adopt Unicode. Multilingual character sets are only a big win if you're mixing multiple languages. If Matz didn't originally expect Ruby to take off in a big way internationally, then for the sorts of uses he probably envisaged, just Japanese and English would be fine, and you can handle that combination perfectly well using any of the legacy Japanese systems.