Just for my own edification, are there any examples of Perl operators that changed precedence in mainstream Perl releases? Let's not consider the addition of new operators to be a "change of precedence", for this discussion.

I ask, because it strikes me as one of those things that would be a really bad idea. It's easy to look at //= and know, "Oh, I better be using Perl 5.10 or newer." But it's really hard to look at an operator and have to worry that code that uses it might break due to precedence changes between Perl versions.

Oh wait! We could use another pragma: "use funky_precedence;", and then we have to skim through code to determine if it's using new or old precedence semantics.

This is a feature idea that, once again, adds complexity, a huge potential for new bugs in existing code as well as in the Perl interpreter, without making anything that was previously hard or impossible now easy or possible.


Dave

In reply to Re: Precedence design question...'x' & arith by davido
in thread Precedence design question...'x' & arith by perl-diddler

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