FWIW, and this is my personal prefered dev environment... 

$ gcc -v
Reading specs from /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-unknown-openbsd4.1/3.3.5/specs
Configured with:
Thread model: single
gcc version 3.3.5 (propolice)

It was only a few releases ago (each release is 6 months apart) that OpenBSD was shipping with gcc 2.95 as the system compiler. And they're currently in the initial stages of discussion about replacing gcc because it's getting big, bloated, buggy, and regularly drops support for various architectures that some people still use.

Perl isn't at all like that though. If anything, later releases fix bugs (while adding a manageable amount of features/bloat), and that's a good enough incentive to upgrade IMO. But not everyone out there sees it that way, or cares at all. In which case, I say to them "So be it!" or "As you wish!", and write my code so that it functions even on ancient releases. Because to me it's neither difficult, nor a great burden to support 5.005*, and I'm content enough to be able to get paid writing Perl code in the first place.

Heck, it could be much worse. Apparently the python guys have to keep several versions of the interpreter around just to run older code!

* Except on Win32, and then I need 5.8 to do anything remotely useful. ;-)

In reply to Re^4: The need and the price of running on old versions of Perl by perlhaq
in thread The need and the price of running on old versions of Perl by szabgab

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