I also have not ever used "smartmatch" and friends. I have never encountered it in code I've worked on at various employers, and that's neither because they were so clever, nor because they were all using old perls. It's because of the incredible confusion and instability around the "features," and also because no good use case for using them has been presented. What exactly is the problem that it's supposed to solve, that cannot be elegantly (enough) solved with normal loop and conditional constructs?

I will not shed a tear if smartmatch/given/etc. are reimplemented so code that uses them breaks (I expect that CPAN modules that break will be fixed), or if it completely goes away for now (which I think is the most sensible suggestion in the p5p thread that encapsulates the current debate).

However, I am alarmed at the process with which the changes have been already merged into bleadperl, as highlighted by LeonT and brian d foy. If that is the way things are going to get done, I fear that Perl will come to be viewed -- correctly -- as an unstable mess where there are no adults in charge.

In my opinion, that of a journeyman, workday Perl programmer, at the root of all this was the fiction that "Perl6" was a real thing in 2007, and the precipitous rush to implement many of its "features" in Perl v.5.10. Damian Conway and people who, like him, are outlandishly clever but also suffer from an excess of hubris, should be kept far away from the core of Perl!


The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

In reply to Re^2: Update to smartmatch by 1nickt
in thread Update to smartmatch by stevieb

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.