Basically the idea is that your module states

use 5.20;

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And it will get (lexical) 5.20.x semantics for its code, no matter what version of Perl it runs on. At least to the best of effort that can be made.

The intention is to free Perl code up from backwards compatibility issues in the sense that for example the current implementation of the smartmatch operator ~~ does not make much sense, but code that uses it now will likely expect 5.14 semantics.

The one thing that Jesse has not yet declared is how to specify "I need Perl 5.xx or higher". For example, I have code that declares it wants Perl 5.06 because it wants lexical filehandles. But that same code will (likely) run on any future version of Perl as well, so I don't want to request 5.06 semantics for everything.

In reply to Re^2: Back to the __future__ by Corion
in thread Back to the __future__ by cdarke

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