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Dear Sirs,

Here I'm putting my short correspondence with Mr Zeev Suraski from www.zend.com in which the errors I found in the last PHP manual is detailfully explained.

I hope this to be of use to you.

Regards,

Latchezar Mintcheff


Dear Zeev,

Thank you for the kind reply (below).

As you suggested, I posted the same message to bugs.php.net, but I think that it will be of use or at least of interest to you.

No doubt, people that work on PHP are doing great job, especially having in mind they are volunteers.

Unfortunately, the terms below are often messed up, and this makes many manuals unclear and even wrong in some parts.

To avoid other errors in the future PHP manuals, the correct matter is as follows:

The CHARACTER is a separate basic symbol of a given alphabet.

The ALPHABET is a system of characters, used for writing and shared by certain group of people, nation, group of nations, countries etc. The alphabet may be Latin, Cyrillic, Greek etc.

The CHARACTER SET is a collection of alphabetical and other symbols that satisfies a specific writing system.

The CHARACTER CODE is the machine/computer/program representation (coding) of a specific character or other writing symbol.

The CODEPAGE is a list of selected character codes in a certain order.

The CODE TABLE or CHARACTER TABLE is the table in which a particular codepage codes and their respective characters (and other symbols) are structured.

The codepage in most cases specifies:

a) the alphabet;
b) the character set;
c) the national (or some other) keyboard layout.

The KEYBOARD LAYOUT is the accordance of the keys of the keyboard with the order of some alphabet and/or with other elements of a specific writing system. The keyboard may be hardware or software defined - by the manufacturer or by a codepage.

That's why we have alphabets - Latin, Cyrillic, Greek etc. This is the main thing. And, from other hand, we have codepages - ISO-8859-1 (Latin), Windows-1251 (Cyrillic), DOS-855 (Cyrillic Bulgarian), IBM-866 (Cyrillic Russian) etc. We use them to write on a specific keyboard in a specific language with a specific character set.

I sincerely hope that you won't accept the above as a boring input in your matter, and that it will help to clarify the parts in the PHP manual the said terms concern.

Best regards,

Latchezar Mintcheff

Latchezar Mintcheff Publishers
Complex Nadejda, bl. 319, en. K
1229 Sofia
Bulgaria

Telephone (359 2) 375735
E-mail: lm@latchezarmintcheff.com
http://www.latchezarmintcheff.com



Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 01:41:37 +0000
From:Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com>
Subject: Re: FW: [CONTENT] Contact from zend.com
To: latchezarmintcheff@angelfire.com
Reply To: zeev@zend.com



Dear Latchezar,

Thanks for your comment! Note that PHP is an opensource, volunteer based project, involving hundreds of people around the globe. Generally, comments (including problem reports) about the PHP manual can be submitted at bugs.php.net, classified as 'Documentation Problem'. The guys who wrote

PHP have little to do with the quality of the PHP manual. They're simply not the guys who wrote it. The PHP manual on Zend.com is a mirror of the PHP manual, which is published regularly by the PHP Documentation Team.

Specifically regarding your comment, to minimize efforts, I fixed the descriptions as you suggested. They'll be updated with the next few days, when the manual rebuilds.

Thanks!

Zeev



comment:  Sirs,  The character set and it aliases below:  cp866, ibm866, 866, cp1251, Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251  are not "DOS and Windows specific charset for Russian", as specified at:

http://www.zend.com/manual/function.htmlspecialchars.php

and at the entire PHP documentation. As it's well known all over the world, these are only two of many existing CYRILLIC encodings. The name of the respective alphabet is "CYRILLIC", not Russian. The Russians have only Russian language and Russian keyboard layout. They use the Cyrillic alphabet, which is of Bulgarian origin. There is no time and room to dicuss why it's called "Cyrillic", but in two words, it's after the names of St Cyrill and St Methodius. It's strange and partly amusing that all the peaple know this,
excepting the creators and the developers of PHP. Regards.  Latchezar Mintcheff, Latchezar Mintcheff Publishers, Sofia, Bulgaria