I agree with your analogy, it's pretty much like what Perl 6 is going to be to Perl 5. But you can't complain about it when words like `backward compatibility' do not appear in the upgrade manual. What if all these COBOL statements had been kept, but would have instead run much slower, because on the new COBOL version their meaning had extended and many new checks were necessary?

Or worse, as in this case, the old code touched a bug which made things run too fast, leading to unrealistically high speed expectations from the developer (and indirectly the management). I used the IBM example because they would have taken care of the following: they would've not fixed a bug whose fixing would seriously slow down all previous code (without making a big thing about it and write self-healing code) and they would've not let their product be mutilated by any redistributor.

In reply to Re^2: The Deceiver by perldeveloper
in thread Why does a Perl 5.6 regex run a lot slower on Perl 5.8? by perldeveloper

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.