in reply to Use of 'our' considered harmful

Clearly the tool's author should have included:

require 5.6;

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And then the SysAdmin could have just upgraded to Perl 5.6 or higher to take advantage of the require version syntax.

Simple!

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Re^2: Use of 'our' considered harmful
by Anonymous Monk on Sep 27, 2004 at 14:10 UTC
    "Just" upgraded to Perl 5.6? "Just"? I don't think there has ever been a Perl releases that did not break scripts out there. Every Perl release breaks things. Sometimes intentional. Sometimes because of a bugfix. Sometimes because a feature is suddenly considered a bug, or bad coding style, and it gets "fixed". Sometimes because behaviour was unspecified (but consistent) and then it got specified to act different from how it always worked. And often the breakage was unintentional.

    There are (very) large companies out there, with tens of thousands of users using hundreds or thousands of tools who might take a year to roll out a new version of Perl. And who *intentionally* do not upgrade because of the breakage.

    One can't assume that what you can do on your home PC - just upgrading Perl in 20 minutes - one can do everywhere.

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