Unfortunately our only works in Perl 5.6. Perl 5.6.0 is most definitely not ready for production. Try this code to see why not:

perl -e 'my $x = 10; $x = "2" . $x; print $x + 0'
[download]

If you don't have 5.6.0 installed the problem is that when you altered $x with a string operation, the number was not properly invalidated, leading to data corruption.

But with 5.6.1 (which has a *lot* of bug fixes) then I heartily agree that our is better.

EDIT
I was asked where to find 5.6.1. Well, um, you can't. Check back next month. As I understand it 5.7.0 will come out first (next development series), and then 5.6.1 will follow that. But there are a lot of good bug fixes in current bleeding edge Perl's. (I certainly have them on my home machine.)

OK, so where do you get that? Um, I don't know. :-( I know where an ftp server used to be with a fairly recent snapshot. It isn't there any more and I don't follow this stuff closely. I can track down instructions for the perforce snapshot, but because of firewalls I cannot test that advice. And I don't even know if that advice will still work given the recent handing over of development responsibilities to Jarko Hietaniemi. (Which is presumably why the ftp server moved.)

Visit back here and I will update this when I find a real answer. (If anyone knows then /tell me or post here. Thanks.)

EDIT 2
Aren't you glad you visited back? Apparently ActiveState is merely having some technical problems. But there is a private snapshot from the current maintainer available. This is on its way to becoming 5.7.0. Basically avoid anything that says it is experimental. (Uh, you should do that anyways.:-) Believe it or not, I would be more inclined to trust this snapshot than the current 5.6.0. YMMV.

EDIT 3
Sarathy claims that their ftp server has been being accessed since Aug 1. So try that and hopefully YMMV from mine. (That machine has more snapshots, and the previous link is only going to work temporarily.) I have no idea what the issue is, it could be local to my home. :-(

EDIT 4
Someone else reproduced the problem. There appears to be an active/passive firewall barrier. Set your ftp client accordingly and the Activestate link should work.

EDIT 5
Sarathy has announced that there will be at least temporary public http access at http://public.ActiveState.com/gsar/APC/. Plus the firewall issues are being looked at.