There are actually 2 problems with this approach. The first is the one I mentioned above where a perhaps pointless error is thrown for users with older perls. The second is that just because a module is in core for a certain perl version does not guarantee that it is installed. RHEL does this a lot, for example: if I were to run your code on a stock RHEL5 machine it would pass the version test (5.8.8) but then throw the compiler error because the module isn't actually installed.

FWIW, I think it would be considered fine to use a module which has been in core that long anyway. Folks running really old perls or those without core modules present will mostly be used to installing such dependencies. Your choice, of course.

In reply to Re^5: Assigning default values to function arguments which may be “empty” by hippo
in thread Assigning default values to function arguments which may be “empty” by Wyrdweaver

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