The most important thing is to keep those systems running....

I can assure you that Ovid hastily rejected my patch to the Cor design to raise funds to build a space laser to destroy all extant versions of Perl pre-Corinna from every hard drive, tape drive, optical disk, external drive, and paper printout in existence.

So good news; every public release of every version of Perl already released will still be available and that code will stay running!

gratuitous

I don't think this word means the same thing to both of us.

briefly

I don't think this word means the same thing to both of us.

I applaud Ovid for the many years of painstaking effort he's devoted to this.

SunnyD, while language stability is vital - and introducing new features entails risk - the alternative is a slow and certain slide into irrelevance. Quoting Stroustrup from Organizational Culture (Part VI): Sociology:

to remain modern and to meet new challenges, a language must grow (either in language features or in foundation libraries)

See also:

• perlexperiment (perldoc)
• P5P update: Smarter Match (perl.com: 2018)
• Bring back the smartmatch operator (but with sane semantics this time)! by smls (2014)
• Re^3: Modern exposition of "case" or Switch in perl 5.34? by kcott (2021)

«…Quoting Stroustrup…»

Remember Eric Bloodaxe. Some things went wrong with him as well.

«The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

not to make gratuitous changes to the language core. Did we learn nothing from the debacle known briefly as "Perl 6?"

Apparently, not some of us, considering Perl 6 was a brand new language from the ground up; there were no changes to the Perl 5 core whatsoever, so I have no clue why you're comparing apples to cinder blocks here.

You'll be delighted to know that Corinna has been designed with this in mind. Specifically, it's designed to not break backwards compatibility. And because it will be released with a feature guard and is experimental, it can be pulled back and changed if need be, as we've done with other major features (including removing them, if necessary). On top of that, most of Corinna already exists in the form of the Object::Pad test bed. There will be no decades of wait. Hell, we could probably make an RFC next week if we wanted all of Object::Pad, but since we don't, we won't. We're deliberately taking this slow and working with the community to take the time to get it right. It's taken a couple of years, but I suspect it won't take that much longer to get the RFC to P5P.