Hi, merlyn -

Indeed, there are always many new questions and questioners, and always more of them than answers and answerers, especially ones as wise and experienced as yourself.

However, I would -- with much sackcloth and ashes weighing my shoulders to promote humble thought -- diffidently suggest that Perl and the domains it interfaces with are so large that there are many questions well worth having answered that aren't. PerlMonks is a hugely valuable community resource, and having such answers in our archive -- even if they might no longer be pertinent for the OP's urgent need -- is much more important than having forty-leven different explanations of regex parameters that disappear into the mists of time.

There are few resources where multi-system questions are appropriately answered, and this is one of them. Perl is such a wonderful gluey mess that people use it for all kinds of things. There are a few others (UGU comes to mind), but often such are so diluted by their need to handle many variants of their subject matter.

I can appreciate that many neophytes come to PerlMonks looking for answers to questions about core Perl, but there are also those of us who are here to seek insight and to share experience about far more exotic usages and interations.

Why cannot PM serve both? As it is now, both mundane and exotic questions share space on SoPW. If there were to be a distinction, both questioners and answerers would have direct access to that which they seek. No longer would neophytes be confused by exotica, and no longer would arcane practitioners have their incantations swept away upon the winds of mundane dust.

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