How many times has a person come here asking why code they found online or pieced together themselves doesn't work when it's something that would have been resolved if they knew to use strict and warnings

And the answer is of course, "Many, many times". However, if Perl7 in its proposed guise does come to pass then your question will subsequently become:

How many times has a person come here asking why code they found online or pieced together themselves doesn't work when it's something that would have been resolved if they knew to use compat::perl5?

because there's so much old, old code out there which will break on Perl7 because of the lack of backwards compatibility. Some of it is, no doubt, truly woeful code that would be better off being binned and re-written anyway [hippo waves at formmail.pl] but much of it (and an increasing amount as time goes on) is perfectly usable code under Perl5.

So Perl7 needs to cater for newbies who find old code which suddenly fails and also to folks like salva who already have lots of old code which suddenly needs to be rewritten to be portable to both existing and new perls. A vast amount of effort will be required to educate all manner of users and I fear that the Monastery will need to put about 3 or 4 FAQs on the homepage and prominently elsewhere to prevent a deluge of similar questions.

As someone who 'knows perl', adding a one line pragma to keep your wild and crazy weekend coding lifestyle intact is hardly an onerous task.

But it's not even that, is it? The pragma will fail on Perl5 so how can you trivially change the old code to be portable to both? Suddenly it becomes a considerable maintenance task.

Perhaps the real problem with this plan is that those who have proposed it have only been working with super-clean PBP-approved code for the last 5 years and have underestimated the sheer volume of older, looser code which is in active use more generally. It would be good to think that a feasible approach could be reached which caters to all but I for one can't quite see what it would be.

In reply to Re^7: Modernizing the Postmodern Language? by hippo
in thread Modernizing the Postmodern Language? by WaywardCode

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