First, my confession:

I am not a Perl hacker, just a user, and I'm definitely not good enough to be just another Perl hacker.

Now that we have that out of the way, here's how I made myself look silly the other day. I'd like to avoid looking silly in the future (wouldn't you?), so I'd be thrilled to get advice on avoiding it.

A question was posted in the Chatterbox recently along the lines of:

"What does @hash{@array} = (); do?"

Now, those of you who've kept up know that's a hash slice undefing each value in %hash with a key in @array, but those of us who have been using old versions (like me--customer requirements) might not.

Now, I know about perldelta, but what if I'm going from 5.004 to 5.6.1 and don't know what's new in, say, 5.5.3?

The best solution is to be an early adopter on at least one test box--and I'm going to try to do that in the future.

But what what else can be done? People were kind and very helpful, but I'd rather they didn't have to be. I'd like to think of myself as someone who can give more than he takes, but I don't know that I'm living up to it.

adamsj

P.S. I said I knew about perldelta, but maybe I don't--does an install look at your current version and give you all the changes since then? Or does it just give a canned summary since the last major update?

I think it's the latter--so why didn't I think of this in time for the Perl 6 RFC process?

They laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went right ahead and built it. --Gracie Allen

In reply to Keeping up with the Japhses by adamsj

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