Re: Use of 'our' considered harmful

Real life story: I wanted to make one of my modules as backwards-compatible as possible, so I installed various versions of perl to try it (including 5.8.0, 5.6.1, 5.004_05, and 5.005_03). After removing all use of the newest features such as our, I found that the oldest, pre-5.6 versions of perl crashed (as in segfault) when running my code (perhaps I was using features that were experimental at the time, but still syntactically valid?). My conclusion: I won't care about supporting ancient versions of Perl, so I can use our happily. One thing is to avoid new features, but it just takes too much time to work around the various bugs in ancient perls.

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Re^2: Use of 'our' considered harmful by synistar (Pilgrim) on Sep 24, 2004 at 14:08 UTC
I think this also brings up a valid point - modules in general continue to evolve in incorporate newer language features. For example, the latest version of DBI does not work with 5.005x or earlier. The more that modules continue to develop the more older versions of perl will be left behind.	[reply]
Re^3: Use of 'our' considered harmful by SpanishInquisition (Pilgrim) on Sep 24, 2004 at 14:36 UTC
Nothing wrong with forced advancement as long as it's slow. If we had people happily writing Perl 5.005 code (or worse, imagine Perl 4), we would have people trying to keep up with the language and seek out new features. Stagnation = death. I don't want Perl to be like awk. No one does. Also, more On-Topic: This topic isn't remotely about our being considered harmful, it's about your sysadmin being considered harmful. Our is not as good as my due to the principle of "smaller scope" is better, and I write code all day without it -- but I note a recent trend to tack "considered harmful" onto the end of meditations to appear like a certain famous computer science guy, and that's just silly.	[reply]
Re^4: Use of 'our' considered harmful by hardburn (Abbot) on Sep 24, 2004 at 16:18 UTC
I note a recent trend to tack "considered harmful" onto the end of meditations to appear like a certain famous computer science guy, and that's just silly. Yes, "considered harful" should be considered harmful. IIRC, the ACM specifically banned that phrase from appearing in article titles shortly after the Dijkstra one. "There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.	[reply]