Sadly, it fails on features

I was surprised, especially since the changelist shows perlver v1.39 should recognize postderef correctly. So I did some investigation:

I don't think that passing code that doesn't compile should be expected to work "right" (and calling say without a use feature qw(say) or use v5.10 or newer doesn't compile), but I would expect perlver to complain about non-compiling code.

If you explicitly use feature qw(postderef); , then perlver will correctly tell you that v5.20.0 is necessary; but you are right that it should recognize that v5.24-onward allow for postfix dereferencing without an explicit feature call, and actually look for the postfix dereferencing syntax.

I also found that use feature qw(postderef say); will be recognized as needing v5.20.0, but use feature qw(say postderef); will claim it only requires 5.10.0.

After doing that investigation, I have submitted three bug reports:

In reply to Re^4: tangent: 'perlver' and 'postderef' (was: poll ideas quest 2023 [Reasonable 'use VERSION' for new CPAN modules]) by pryrt
in thread poll ideas quest 2023 by pollsters

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