Should it be best practice to start all programs with

No. As a cpan-tester, i see far too many modules (created by h2xs), which have use 5.008; when they aren't using any 5.008 specific features.

I think it's a good idea to inlude use VERSION but only if you are sure that VERSION is the minimum required version of perl, and you're doing this because you're using a perl feature which was introduced in VERSION.

You should not use 5.006; because that's when the warnings pragma was first introduced.
You should only use 5.005; because that's when the qr operator was first introduced, and you're using qr in your program.
You should not guess. If you don't know if your program uses perl features which were not available in some VERSION of perl, don't guess, just leave out the use VERSION; statement.

Now I realize you said "require", but I prefer compile-time checking, and seeing how the use VERSION; syntaxt was first introduced in perl 5.004, some might prefer to use BEGIN { require VERSION } when appropriate ;)

MJD says "you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"
I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6.x and 5.8.x -- I take requests (README).
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In reply to Re: Code should be version-aware by PodMaster
in thread Code should be version-aware by ajdelore

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