G'day symgryph,

"I have read a lot about NOT using the 'switch' statement of yore, ..."

You need to be a bit careful with terminology. Perl does not have nor, as far as I know, has ever had a 'switch' statement. It does have "The 'switch' feature". There is a CPAN Switch module which provides a 'switch' function. I'm going to assume that you're talking about the Switch module.

The BUGS and LIMITATIONS sections of Switch both provide a number of reasons to avoid it. I would strongly recommend against using it in production code.

"... but saw some comments on using 'when' instead."

I'll assume that's from the Switch BUGS section: "In general, use given/when instead.".

When that was written, it was probably an entirely reasonable statement; however, in 5.18.0 'given', 'when, and the associated '~~' operator, were made experimental: "perl5180delta: The smartmatch family of features are now experimental". At 5.34.0 they remain experimental:

$ perl -v | head -2 | tail -1
This is perl 5, version 34, subversion 0 (v5.34.0) built for cygwin-th
+read-multi

$ perl -E 'say 1~~2 ? "yes" : "no"'
Smartmatch is experimental at -e line 1.
no

$ perl -E 'my $x = 1; given ($x) { when (2) { say "yes" } default { sa
+y "no" } }'
given is experimental at -e line 1.
when is experimental at -e line 1.
no
[download]

Again, I would not use these in production code.

"Is there a modern howto on doing a case like construct in perl 5.34?"

• There are a couple of (5.34.0) examples in "perlsyn: Basic BLOCKs".
• There are some older but still valid (5.6.0) examples in "(5.6.0) perlsyn: Basic BLOCKs and Switch Statements".
• There's a variant of one of the 5.6.0 examples that I use from time to time. See 'sub orient_matrix {...}' in "Creating X BitMap (XBM) images with directional gradients". There is some discussion about this in the remainder of the thread.

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