It's not always a matter of being afraid to upgrade Perl. For example, Solaris 8 came with Perl 5.6 or 5.005. Perl wasn't used on that machine for a big program but for convenient small utility programs that created human readable diffs. Having modules needlessly require higher versions of Perl would have lessened the utility of Perl on that platform by much.

I am not against using features when they are useful. I almost always use three-arg open() and qr// whenever they are needed. But especially our is a useless feature that introduces a 5.6 dependency which is completely unneeded - use vars qw() achieves (almost) the same, except that you have to refer to a global variable by its global name from outside the package, which I consider more correct.

For example, one of my modules, parent works with Perl down to 5.004, and Maddingue helped me weed out the compatibility problems that only existed in the test suite. Often, little fixes restore backwards compatibility and if you want your code to be used, thinking of backwards compatibility makes it easier for your users to actually use your code in their environment.

In reply to Re: The need and the price of running on old versions of Perl by Corion
in thread The need and the price of running on old versions of Perl by szabgab

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