Pseudo-hashes have been deprecated in Perl 5.8.0 and will be removed from 5.10.0. They will also not appear in Perl 6.

As you suspected, the fields pragma will be rewritten to remove the pseudo-hashes parts. There've been a couple of discussions on p5p about the best way to do this.

If using fields makes you more productive, feel free to use it. I rarely need it, but that has more to do with the kind s of problems I'm trying to solve than any particular distaste or fear of the pragma.