Re^3: p5p vs CPAN

like for example, my $foo qw(bar baz) makes perfect sense and was valid perl until

I'm afraid to say that it doesn't make perfect sense to me. What would you expect it to mean?

It's also not valid perl, even on the oldest one I could find:

$ perl -v

This is perl, v5.8.8 built for i386-linux-thread-multi

Copyright 1987-2006, Larry Wall

Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License
+ or the
GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5 source ki
+t.

Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found 
+on
this system using "man perl" or "perldoc perl".  If you have access to
+ the
Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.org/, the Perl Home Pa
+ge.

$ perl -e 'my $foo qw(bar baz)'
syntax error at -e line 1, near "$foo qw(bar baz)"
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
[download]

The result is broken scientific distros sitting on CPAN forever because, for example, we now have to --force install and add 2 characters to 1 module to fix 3 modules.

I am no advocate for breaking backwards compatibility but a seemingly trivial change to a module which moves it from unusable to working on modern perls is something any module maintainer should be doing. Just not necessarily in the next half hour. If there's no repsonse to such tickets in a reasonable time-frame (give them a few weeks at least) then it's probably abandoned and a good candidate for a take-over.

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Re^4: p5p vs CPAN by pryrt (Abbot) on Oct 17, 2019 at 13:40 UTC
like for example, `my $foo qw(bar baz)` makes perfect sense and was valid perl until I'm afraid to say that it doesn't make perfect sense to me. What would you expect it to mean? It's also not valid perl I assume this was the same anonymous monk from Re^2: How can I create a simple Autocad drawing with Perl, who complained about needing to fix `foreach my $action qw(load save) {` to `foreach my $action (qw(load save)) {` in order to use CAD::Drawing::IO. Apparently, this AM either didn't read, didn't like, or didn't accept afoken's detailed explanation as to why the original syntax was never meant to work (hence Corion's use of "bugwards compatibility" earlier in this thread).	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: p5p vs CPAN by Anonymous Monk on Oct 18, 2019 at 04:17 UTC
It's also not valid perl, even on the oldest one I could find ... v5.8.8 According to CPAN Testers "Use of qw(...) as parentheses" was "valid" perl after 5.8.8. The deprecation warning showed up in 5.13.5 and became fatal for linux in 5.18.1 and bsd in 5.18.4. Then this broke: `foreach my $foo qw(bar baz){}`	[reply]