Okay, I consider myself a fairly advanced Perl programmer (after over a dozen years of it), but I find that distinction pretty danged subtle. I'd say the message "use of reserved word XXX is deprecated" is very poorly worded. It very much sounds like "use of XXX is deprecated, and, by the way, it is a reserved word".

The existence of perldiag.pod helps relieve this problem (it says "Future versions of perl may use it as a keyword..." for this message).

But it is still terrible because the meaning of "reserved word" in C (the only other place I've heard that term) is "a word reserved for use by the language", that is "if", "else", "goto", etc. So a "reserved word" in C is the same as a "keyword" in Perl.

It is strange that Perl, a language that takes much from C, to use C's phrase for "keyword" as Perl's phrase for "not yet a keyword".

In fact, I just did some checking of my facts, and I found the use of the term "reserved word" for what Perl calls "keyword" in several places other than C. In fact, Perl uses the term "reserved word" to include current keywords (see perldata.pod) so to say "'our' is a reserved word" doesn't even tell you that "our" isn't currently a keyword.

A much better error message would be "The bareword XXX may become a Perl keyword, please quote it". *sigh*, now I have a moral obligation to submit a patch. :)

OK. </rant>

In reply to RE: RE: RE: History of 'our' by tye
in thread History of 'our' by jeffa

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